'Tis a Gift ...

Something nice and unexpected happened yesterday. I received a card in the mail from my high school Spanish teacher, one of the most inspiring, energetic, passionate teachers and people I've been privileged to learn from in my life. I had for junior and senior year, and she not only never gave me a hard time when I'd accidentally lapse into French because I was taking both at the same time, but she also made Spanish language and literature come alive for me -- I still remember reading 100 Years of Solitude and the poems of Garcia Lorca, all in Spanish, and then writing reams of silly parodies with my friend Elizabeth, which our teacher eventually found out about and loved. She was one of those people for whom you were on your best behavior because you simply didn't want to lose her good opinion. Anyway, I haven't seen her since I visited campus on a trip home my freshman year in college, but last summer I made a [small] donation to the alumni fund in her honor. She wrote lamenting her lateness in thanking me (as if that mattered!) and letting me know in the warmest of terms that she still thinks of me, and of my sister, and would love to know how we're doing. She also said that she and other faculty members look back on the early 1990's as the best time at the school, and judging from recent events and publications, I think I understand why. So, I was so thrilled to hear from her, and now I need to write back to her and fill her in on the last 13 years of my life! So, unlike my classmates, I am not entering my work in the Cannes Film Festival, reviewing books for the New York Times or writing books to be reviewed by same, becoming a partner in a Manhattan law firm, anchoring a TV news station, working as chief resident at a Boston teaching hospital, or influencing policy on Capitol Hill. I am married with three children, and I stay home with them, and I even (gulp!) homeschool them! Of course I am happy with my choices, or maybe I should say content with them, and I wouldn't trade for a minute, but every time the alumni magazine comes in the mail, I launch into full-on reflective mode. Maybe because I never really bought in to the worship of education and success that was so paramount in the world I lived in for those four years, it always seemed like a bit of a borrowed lifestyle even then -- and even more so now. I got an excellent education in many respects, but some would look at the life I'm living now and accuse me of wasting it. And they could be right. By the standards of the world, and particularly the world of the Northeast prep school crowd, I have not been a success. My daily challenges tend to run not toward deconstructing Kafka or Nietzsche but along the lines of convincing a two year old to let me help her with her seatbelt and not to eat an entire jar of fish oil capsules when she is dead set on doing so.

And yet, because I have tasted a bit of that world, I know firsthand that none of that -- education, power, money, outward success -- truly satisfies. As high schoolers, my classmates were groping with the big questions about the meaning of life, and I wonder whether they still do, or whether their pursuits have muffled that seeking. At that age, I already had come to know the One who is "the way, the reality, and the life," and to know that He does satisfy, that He does fill that hole inside that nothing else can. So I was different then, and knew it, and am still different now, and know it now. Once every few months, I get a message from the past, via magazine or handwritten note, and the issue is grappled with, and settled, again. Though it may not always look like it, truly we are blessed with life abundant.

I wonder what my teacher will think.