Arrival
It was the season for arrivals when I arrived, a shiny new toy in a tiny package. It was a Sunday at the end of November; so the anticipation of my arrival was followed by the four weeks of anticipation which are Advent. Then, on Christmas, my brothers got their new toys and I got admired. As with many of us, no arrival in my life has since been so celebrated.
I often say that most of what we do in life is moving stuff from one place to another. Put differently, our lives are written in departures and arrivals. Most of them are fairly minor; they're recapitulated every day as we pass through the doors of here and again through the doors of there, and back again. But, once in a while, there's a big one: we leave our parents' house to make our own, we depart from school days to enter the so-called "real" world, we bid goodbye to a life of activity and vigor and arrive in one of decline, disease, and death. Or maybe just death.
Every day I see a stranger. I don't mean, this time, that I see one in the mirror. I see someone I've never seen before, a new arrival in the world which is my life. Almost all of them are windows that close as fast as they open, but it remains that they are all arrivals, and there's no way of knowing which of them might be here to stay. New people are better than new toys, I think; anyway I hope that's what all the commotion over my arrival was about. Hello, stranger.
