Shed a Little Light
Fifty years.
One of my newspaper assignments this year has been Texas high school basketball, specifically two small schools in neighboring counties.
I found myself this week on the campus of Abilene Christian University, where my parents met and fell in love.
Where my siblings and I found ourselves years later, products of that union who would be Wildcats, too.
Sitting courtside, I saw the arena where I played collegiate volleyball for four years. Moody Coliseum has had several rounds of upgrades since I last played on its court in the fall of 1977, and I must say the Wildcat brand is alive and well in its athletic facilities.
But it was the time frame that threw me.
Fifty years ago I was a sophomore in college, majoring in English, living in a dorm, running wind sprints during season and making McDonald’s and Baskin-Robbins runs after those volleyball games.
Where did those five decades go? How did I end up here cheering for a team that last week beat the school where I have taught for almost fifty years?
I think I have the answer to those questions in literature, as is often one of the sweet perks of reading. Amor Towles, author of A Gentleman in Moscow: the Novel, provided some clarity as I finished the audiobook on the drive to Abilene to report on this ballgame.
“…our lives are steered by uncertainties, many of which are disruptive or even daunting; but that if we persevere and remain generous of heart, we may be granted a moment of lucidity—a moment in which all that has happened to us suddenly comes into focus as a necessary course of events, even as we find ourselves on the threshold of the life we had been meant to lead all along.”
If you are in the camp of “older” as I am, chances are you relate to Towles’s words.
Life has disruptions and is daunting: illness, heartache, stretching a paycheck from week to week or month to month, rejection, failure.
And then comes, for whatever reason, the moment when the ship rights itself, and those events come into view with clearness and purpose.
“We find ourselves on the threshold of the life we had been meant to lead all along.”
In one week, I turn 70. I was meant to be a daughter to Guy and Lillie, sister to Scotty and Sara and Shane and Sabrina, mother to Julie and Emily, grandmother to Lillie and Ellie and Eddie, teacher to over a thousand students in a little town in Borden County.
Because of all of those “meant to be” moments and people, I now get to sit in a purple and black chair in a gym having the time of my life, however much remains.
Fifty years ago life looked a lot different.
Thank goodness some of the view still remains.