Postcards in Acts

I've been pawing through boxes of family files. A postcard from the Red Cross in 1914 reassured my grandfather's family that he had survived the long voyage. A Lincoln centennial postcard announced the birth of a child with the simple words: 'We have a 7 lb baby girl at home. Come see it when you can.'

Photos grab hold. Here my mother and dad, with arms linked around people with unfamiliar faces, so treasured the memories captured that they kept them all of their lives. Young and strong, my father held me in his arms before I could hold myself, his tanned forearms reaching across another frame to light my first birthday candle and sing. My mother stands by his side, immersed in happiness and peace, knowing life only as a simple flowered dress and sensible shoes.

I never lay on the carved mahogany bed with creaky slat side rails without thinking of what it knows, times before electricity, indoor plumbing, automobiles, and basic medical miracles, refrigeration, and phones. I stare at a 1920s photo of the bed, marble top dressers, hand carved mirror which is virtually unchanged. The craftsman from 1856 is gone, as is my Great Uncle Don who had saw it new and had it sent by covered wagon from New York to Chicago Heights to provide life its comfort and continuity.

Who has lived and loved in this bed, and how did they spend their lives? In a hundred years, maybe it will it be on display somewhere, in one of my children's children's homes, and pictures will be discovered in a box somewhere with a smiling me in old fashioned clothes. They might lay on it and wonder about the tender moments spent discovering love for the first time, cradling babies or crying themselves to sleep. I hope my sons as fathers will wrap their arms around their children and tell them about me and the early years, when life for them was playful and noisy and new.

Life feels amazingly gradual: neverending days and hours and moments offer ample time to do and think and wonder and play. We won't come up short, we think: there will be time to fit it all in. But as gravity takes hold, and we are astonished to learn we, too, are transitory, what matters is that we passed this way at all. What we hand off to future generations is our indellible mark: how we spent the time we had and what that says about the people we were.