w h a t . i s ?

July 09, 2013 • 3 Comments

Tomorrow is another day for all of us.

Having said that, I have made us, for a few hours at least, what most of us do not have and what we need so desperately - I have made us an extended family, one for all and all for one. A husband, a wife and some kids is not a family; it’s a terribly vulnerable survival unit. Now those of you who get married or are married, when you fight with your spouse, what each of you will be saying to the other one actually is, "You’re not enough people. You’re only one person. I should have hundreds of people around."

I met a man and a wife in Nigeria - Ibos. They just had a new baby. They had a thousand relatives there in southern Nigeria, and they were going to take that baby around and visit all the other relatives. Now, I’ve made us an extended family.

Now this gathering is a work of art. A teacher asked me one time, "What is it artists do?" And I mumbled something. "They do two things," he said. "First, they admit they can’t straighten out the whole universe. And then second, they make at least one little part of it exactly as it should be. A blob of clay, a square of canvas, a piece of paper, or whatever." We have all worked so hard and well to make these moments and this place exactly what it should be.

As I have told you, I had a bad uncle named Dan, who said a male can’t be a man unless he’d gone to war. But I had a good uncle named Alex, who said, when life was most agreeable - and it could be just a pitcher of lemonade in the shade - he would say, "If this isn’t nice, what is?" So I say that about what we have achieved here right now. If he hadn’t said that so regularly, maybe five or six times a month, we might not have paused to notice how rewarding life can be sometimes. Perhaps my good uncle Alex will live on in some of you if, in the future, you will pause to say out loud every so often, "If this isn’t nice, what is?"

Kurt Vonnegut - Syracuse 1994

So much love to my Katie + lucky Mr. Cavan.

claire2