Celebrations - Sharing Community a Year at a Time 9-4-9

Anderson, South Carolina

I had just entered the Y, intent on connecting with a new found friend for lunch in the park. We had agreed to meet at the Y, halfway between our houses; the place where we recently ceased being unknown strangers. Barely into the facility, I encountered a dozen septuagenarians and octogenarians gathered around a table engaged in happy animated conversation. Before I could offer anything other than a generic greeting addressed to the group at large, a man got up and offered me a seat and a platinum-haired woman on the other side of the crowded table offered me a fragrant chunk of moist chocolate birthday cake.

Happily, I took my place, wanting to be nowhere else in the world. I had just been inducted into something truly sacred. For one who has just been given free access to the entire world, not wanting to be anywhere else is a big deal when I say so. I have the vast good fortune of being able to drive to the airport and make a journey anywhere I want. Here a mere couple of miles from my house I was given the elixir that makes life succulent and fragrant. As good as a well made chocolate cake tastes, it does not compare to the taste of a deep generous smile and the hand of friendship. Perhaps one of the most intensely pleasurable feelings a person can have is the sense of being wanted and included by a group of happy beings one respects; and I did not have to get a visa to immigrate.

For nearly an hour I sat with this group enjoying the hospitality of people who have learned what really matters in life. Jack just turned eighty-eight and was in the Y in vibrant good health eating birthday cake after having completed a strenuous workout. Along the way he has learned to celebrate many of the things that make life work - a happy marriage to a truly excellent woman, exercise, faith, accepting with serenity those things he cannot change, changing the ones he can, and moving forward. Bits of conversation about medical challenges are almost inevitable with the elderly. Jack has had challenges thrown at him, things that he could not change. He did have the freedom to choose his responses. I cannot think of a higher measure of success than to make it to august old age with a cloud of loving people celebrating one’s birthday as one cools down from hard exercise. Jack chose the right responses and is a better person for his choices. When lemons came his way he added sugar and shared the lemonade with the rest of us. Today his wife shared chocolate with us.

My ex-stranger, Rebecca, appeared in our midst, and soon found herself welcomed into the happy crowd. As ex-officio youngsters needing another twenty years before we can become official members, we were powerfully informed that getting old can be a blast - a major celebration, every day. As the crescendo of merriment diminished to a pianissimo, the players began quietly dispersing to assorted eating establishments for lunch. My ex-stranger, who is already finishing my sentences for me, joined me on a journey to the city park near my house where we worked at becoming less strangers and making the park a safe friendly place.
For nearly three hours we sat under a cerulean canopy with high cirrus clouds at an old green picnic table next to a large pond and fed my stash of has-been old crescent rolls and bread fragments to a large congregation of Canada Geese, regular geese, standard white ducks, and other irregular and regular birds that had a penchant for the stale in life. An admixture of assorted turtles bought into our collection of delectable peels, cores, and too-green fruit fragments. For certain none of our PBJ on fifteen grain bread or cold milk ended up in birds or turtles. We just have to be selfish and set boundaries about some things in life.

Against the backdrop of this gentle feeding frenzy, with a large cloud of witnesses, we proclaimed that being ex-strangers is a really cool thing to become, learning that each person we discover in life contains a treasury of experience, wisdom, thoughts, dreams, hopes, and even traumas.

A couple of weeks ago while attending a funeral I met a stranger in the breakfast room of a hotel south of Pittsburgh. We fell into very animated conversation about all sorts of things. It seemed that we were on the threshold of becoming ex-strangers, so much so that I offered her the world. At the time I was actively seeking God’s choice for someone to share in a grand prize from an airline that provides for air travel for two people for thirty days anywhere in the world. I desperately wanted to pay-it-forward, to give something of extreme value to a stranger who needed to be given the world. I really felt this fellow diner was the right one out of millions of possibilities. I still do weeks later. Yet, my phone calls and e-mails were never answered. Her fear kept her from becoming an ex-stranger and she walked away from the world. Risk means taking the boat out of the harbor and getting out of sight of land. It is the only way to get anywhere. Next time you encounter a stranger, pay attention; he might offer you cake, even the world.

Celebrate community and life, but it works better if you are not a stranger.