Ten Thousand Best Moments

“The best memories . . . are not the milestones you’d imagine; they are the tiniest seconds, the flashes of time . . . The amazing thing is, I could sit here for hours and still not run out of the best moments of my life.” —Jodi Picoult                            

God has leveled the playing field by ensuring that the joy of an achingly pleasant moment is possible for both the richest and the poorest. He’s designed it this way so that we can all know the pure bliss of simply being human. Therefore, as the writer said, the best memories aren’t the milestones, they’re the most “trivial” moments—so marginal that some of them seem almost silly. They involve a wordless interaction, a burst of unrestrained laughter, or an exquisite taste or texture or scent—and they’re often way beyond description. How do you explain what you feel on the first sunny day in March after a brutal winter when the air suddenly smells like light and warmth and grass?

I have a horrible memory, worse than most. Seriously, when people ask me about my twenties or thirties, I stare at them like they’ve asked me to explain quantum physics. Yet I do have select memories that are sweet and vivid. One of them involves a game I used to play with my son, Joshua, when he was in grade school. We lived in a double-wide trailer, and out back was a field completely overgrown with thistle and Queen’s Anne’s lace and other weeds taller than a grown man.

We had a long-legged mutt name Twiggy. (One year she had a fling with the dog next door, and the result was a dozen pups, which Twiggy birthed under the shed one day. We named them all after candy bars—Hershey, Snickers, Peppermint Patty—and gave them away at the flea market.) The game involved the three of us—Josh, Twiggy, and me—running around behind the house in the tall grass. We gave Twiggy the name Wolf-Dog, and we dubbed ourselves Hiawatha and Pocahontas. We’d play under the summer sun, making up scenarios and charging through the thicket, surprising one another by materializing from behind a tree or bramble.

I don't remember much about the rest of my life during that season, because honestly I spent much of my younger years in a fog of fear, pain, and passivity, and then there’s that problem with memory that I mentioned earlier—and yet those afternoon adventures are seared onto my heart. I cannot drive past of field of Queen Anne's Lace without thinking of them. 

Thank you, Lord, for the gift of memorable moments.