Halfway, if you’re lucky

We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless. —Paul Bowles

“The halfway mark,” I said to R today. “Almost 40.”

“Halfway, if you’re lucky,” he said.

“Or unlucky,” I said, “depending on how life’s treating you.”

He smiled. R has been there for me for years now.

He is steady goodness, wry wisdom, a kind challenger and friend.

I have been thinking about the concept of a Rain List, instead of a Bucket List. Things of beauty that have already rained down into my life’s pail. Puddles of joy. Pools of happiness. Little lakes of bliss.

We need this rain to keep going.

I have been lucky.

In 2007—just before dawn and after a bad, scary dream—Sophie said to me, “I think you and Daddy were meant to be together and so you had the exact babies you were meant to have together.”

Yes. She was right.

I don’t want to make the same mistakes again. Out with the old, in with the new mistakes. We screw up perpetually as humans, but I figure it’s personal growth if the mistakes begin to look different, less patterned, less predictable.

Thank you to all of you beautiful raindrops. I can still see you, hear you, touch you, and I am so grateful.