The stuff in between

In the midst of lots of drama life always goes on.

Each of us knows our own mortality, our own life, our own important milestones, but to the universe we are just one more life form among millions of others. We come. We go. We do things in between and that is the important part for most of us.

That stuff in between.

For me that has been particularly important lately.

I drove down to my brother's and the first thing I did was get my car stuck in his yard. I went to visit, not kill him and yet, here he was trying to push me out of the hole I was stuck in. Luckily a nice man drove by, got down on the rain soaked road and hooked a rope to my back axle and pulled me out! The rest of the day was much less strenuous.  I had brought a picnic and my brother drove the car, and five hours later we were back home. A lot of good stuff happened that day.

Tonight I went to the last municipal band concert along with the usual crowd. Like all other nights there were lots of people sitting in lawn chairs listening to some gifted musicians volunteering to perform all sorts of music. Unlike all other nights, tonight was as still as a vacuum and as humid as a Florida swamp in the middle of August.

The musicians played as sweat ran down their glasses, swatting bugs that crawled down their collars and up their legs. The rare breeze that did blow through the park knocked the piccolo's music over towards the end of his rousing solo, but he continued gamely on and either knew the rest by heart, or we knew so little we didn't notice if he simply improvised. A lot of good stuff happened this night.

These are the sort of things that differentiate me from you and all the other living things in our universe and while they may sometimes seem calamitous, in the grand scheme of things they are what make us each unique and right now I can appreciate this.

It's sweet.