Dear Winston Claude Kash,

We wanted you to be a part of our family. We were looking for you, eager and expectant, waiting for your mother and father to show you off proudly to the rest of us. We happily anticipated our family reunions and holiday celebrations growing larger by one. Our love is elastic, you see – we’ll always stretch to accommodate just one more.

It wasn’t just your parents, you know. Nor even just your grandparents, aunts, and uncles. It was the rest of us as well, all of us in the clan – cousins, and great uncles, and grandaunts, and all the rest of the relations in our family there don’t seem to be adequate words to describe.

I met a man, one time, whose mother had had a miscarriage a couple of years before he was born. He sometimes wondered whether his mother, if she had not miscarried, would have gone on to become pregnant with him. Such questions can’t really be answered, but it’s important to ask them anyway – they remind us that we don’t always know everything that’s involved in the mystery of life and death. All we can know is the love of Jesus, and all we can do is trust Him.

That doesn’t make the pain any easier, though. I was reminded of part of Chidiock Tichborn’s elegy:

The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

You came and went so fast, none of us got to actually meet you.

We missed you.

We miss you.

We so wanted you to be a part of us. We so wanted to see you grow up, to play with you, to see you run down the trails in the Alabama woods near the Old Home Place. We wanted you to join us in our journey through life. Now, though – irrepressible spirit that you are! – you’ve run on ahead, and it’ll be a while before we catch up. We know that you’re waiting for us at the end, though, and you’ll be sitting on the front porch swing when we come around that last corner.

Say hello to Grandaddy Hobart for us. Tell him we’ll be along directly.

Love,

Mark

Yesterday, during the worship service at church, Zach tapped me on the shoulder.

“Hey, Mark, I know it’s short notice, but I’m leaving the service early to go to the art museum in Atlanta. It’s for my Art Appreciation class. You want to come?”

“Uh, sure!”

So, we left the service and drove down to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, where we spent a couple of hours looking at the Picasso and Van Gogh exhibits. It was a lot of fun, getting cultured, and getting caught up with Zach on what’s gone on in town for the past decade – who’s married whom, who’s come out of the closet, who’s on the Board of Education, etc. Working as a reporter for the local paper, he has his finger on the pulse of the town (and his wife working as the Republican Party coordinator for the county doesn’t hurt, either). I asked him how accurate most of the rumors are that he hears, and suggested the accuracy was pretty high. One of the things about a small town, he pointed out, was that rumors are easily verifiable. If something’s just a malacious lie, it gets discovered pretty quickly.

I found out that a close childhood friend of mine, Trung, is now married and working as the manager of a Best Buy in a nearby town. I was glad to hear it; I hadn’t heard anything from him since I left for college nearly ten years ago.

Of course, the Van Gogh exhibit wasn’t anything to pass lightly over, either. But it was the second serious dose of culture I got this weekend: Last Friday, I saw A Winter’s Tale at the Shakespeare Tavern. None of us English majors had seen or read it before (except for the department head, and it was so long ago he couldn’t remember it). After I saw it, I realized why it wasn’t as famous as some of Shakespeare’s other plays. A Winter’s Tale could be described as “Just like Much Ado About Nothing, only not as good.” The plot is the same: faithful woman accused of adultery, is exonerated, fakes death to punish husband, later reveals herself to be alive. The plot isn’t as tightly woven as Much Ado, the characters are less developed, and there aren’t as many quotable lines. Also, some characters go sailing to Bohemia (a landlocked country). It was good to see, though.