We're # 2 - We Try Harder!

It's the 2nd of January in the second decade of the third millennium since Christ shook the pillars of Heaven & Earth by audaciously embracing the human condition.

No resolutions - just plans to embrace our changing human condition and to interact with it in increasingly hopeful ways.

We moved Steven to Moose Jaw yesterday for the last time. In 4 months he'll graduate and burn his "school furniture". I hope he keeps one or two pieces. Susie and I have a stack of purloined N.A.D.P. (Northern Alberta Dairy Pool) plastic milk crates that once stood as the foundation to the bed we loved on and slept in. These tough plastic boxes that proclaim their allegiance to their owner - "Property of N.A.D.P" - with enduring words embossed on their sides, have moved our meager sticks and stones from Jasper, to Edmonton (and around that Town) to Saskatchewan and our current Flatland Home. They predate our vows, our children, our current careers and remind us of our humble beginnings.

Occasionally I ruminate on how our illegal possession of these items will be dealt with in ultimate terms.

"Now Brian," the Lord rumbled, "about those milk crates."

"Doh!"

But we can't recompense their owners - the N.A.D.P. is long gone, either defunct or absorbed by another corporate entity - so we're stuck with them and their dubious provenance. I console myself with the thought that their rightful owners never made the type of deep, emotional investment in them that we (or most likely only I) have. My practical wife might blush at the pixels I've squandered on such mundane items, but so often it is the mundane, the utterly pedestrian, the commonplace that marks and holds the connection we have to the historical and the profound.

You can't say Stonehenge is just a bunch of rocks - even if that is just what it is.

So why did I use a title that was the corporate slogan of Avis Car Rentals in the '70s? Because, the two days of 2010 have served to remind me that we are not first, or primary, or most favored. We are average, second string, among the masses. But we TRY!

We are all growing, learning and reaching forward towards a future that will likely turn out to be something quite other than we imagine - and we are so like so many others who do the same. And within that trying is the genius and glory of being human and living.

From humble beginnings including a bed laid upon purloined milk crates to a home that has raised three young men and launched them into the world with their own meager beginnings to tell their own stories of struggle and strife, triumph and truth, we are standing on the cusp of the next chapter in the "great adventure". It ain't on the front pages or burnin' up the blogsphere - but it's a ride we are enjoying.

Hang on! When you try harder you sometimes go faster!

Shalom