All Saints' Day 2006

This day has found me inundated by, awash in memory. I woke up early, aware very first thing that it was All Saints'. How can a day of human construct, artifical as it is, provoke just the sort of response for which it was intended? Such is, I suppose, the power of suggestion and the malability of the human mind. Such is, I must add, the need we have to remember and to reconnect. Such is, blessedly, the gift of the construct.

Here at day's end I realize I cannot possibly name all the people I've known who have died over the course of my 53 years -- much less the people about whom I've known and whose lives and deaths have made a difference to the life I lead. It's astounding. From beloved grandparents and their siblings to the first funeral I remember being televised (Pope John XXIII) to close friends to faraway, sort of cosmic, tragedies. Today brought back the first time I saw the Viet Nam memorial on the mall in Washington on a early morning run sometime in the middle 1980s. Almost brought me to my knees. I pulled out photos of the Cahokia Indian mounds near St Louis (Tal and I visited there two summers ago), which were built in the era of the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico.

There's so much going on besides me. Exclamation point. The life this planet has known, the people who have lived and died -- for thousands of centuries, the longings of them all. This All Saints' Day has been a wonder, a day for wonder, a wonder full day.