Frenzied Serenity

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Enjoying Our Home for About 50 More Hours

"Come here. I want to show you something special." I follow Pat out our front door.

It is the robins' nest. When I left to swim this morning, I thought I saw it lying on the driveway next to the blue, plastic-covered "New York Times," but I kept going, praying that the swim would pep me up, as I under-slept again; it did.

"She made all of that with her beak," says Pat, "How did she get all that mud up there into the tree?"

"And did she just abandon the empty nest --" I ask.

"Or did a squirrel knock it out of the tree?" Pat wonders.

Are we abandoning our home for six months? Or are we being propelled by external forces, along with our choice, to live somewhere new for half a year?

Today, it's purely hot outside and I'm wearing whatever's not packed -- a gray IBM sweatshirt and a pair of dark-raspberry golf shorts.

"Let's see what's blooming in the garden on the side of the house," Pat invites. There's a burgundy dahlia, a stalk of orange-, and a stalk of yellow lillies and an early delicate variety of gladiola -- red and cream.

Ah, how nice to walk back into the air conditioning. And to sit at this quiet desk in a room I use exclusively as my home-office when I'm not in Armonk.

Friendship Refreshment

This morning, I speak with two friends. The first is heterosexual and works in a Jewish day school. When we discuss the woman I met briefly at the Pride Parade, my friend says, "That's why I love [Rabbi] Gordon Tucker's thinking because he understands that religion is supposed to be redemptive and if it's not, then...?"

The second friend, Marni, who I ask permission to name, and I talk about the miracle of our having met and become friends as freshmen in college, during a period of suffering and struggle for each of us.

"I was *such* a diamond in the rough then, Marni."

"Our friendship is an object lesson in the soul," she says, "Our beings recognized each other and that we were going through different versions of the same kinds of things....Besides, our tsores (sorrow/trouble) was and is part of our path."

How lucky am I -- to have such thinking-feeling friends?

Everything is swirling around in the last-minute mania of getting ready for the journey, and then I enjoy these pockets of calm. Thank God.