My second son, Paul, was what they call a man’s man—sleeping outdoors, communing with winter over a fire built with one match, climbing the Half Dome in Yosemite, getting in brawls.  I wanted him to meet a St. Mary’s girl, but he went on to take up with a secular girl.  She was all right as far as secular girls go: she only put his things out of the apartment twice.  But the St. Mary’s girls have hearts that bleed for knights errant (and errored) and a beloved son is in tender hands.

Paul lived pretty much on his own.  He got a job as a librarian (yes, a librarian) and earned his master’s degree.  He went on to become an adjunct professor of English at Paterson University in New Jersey.  But life slew him, and a St. Mary’s girl might have held off the axe.  They are so elegant, so heart-oriented, such ladies.

I don’t blame fate or others; we pretty much lay out our own path.  But to have missed the chance for the companionship of a beautiful lady—what a mishap!

Do you realize that what another person is, as far as you’re concerned, is all a construct of your mind?  In reality, he may be another person completely.  We depend on our brains for our impression of reality, and that brain may not always be so dependable.

I am beginning to realize that now.  I was just balancing my checkbook, which I share with my wife, and I told her she’d sent two checks without entering the info.  She objected.  I reviewed the entrees several times, and finally realized everything was as it should be.  My brain never did that to me before, so I surmised that with age it was getting worse.  I have other, daily proof.

When I was younger, such blatant evidence didn’t occur to me, so some mistakes may not have been caught.  What if my mind misconstrued a person’s personality?  As a result, I probably didn’t get along with him or her.  I may have avoided an entirely pleasing person.

Like it or not, I have to get along with this brain, as I always had, and be thankful that it is not an off (such as schizophrenic) brain.   That would take more compensating effort.

The attractive daughter of a Southhampton millionaire was looking for a husband.  She had many suitors, but the one who attracted her the most was a handsome, moderately wealthy young man who’d come into her dining room, sit down, and put his cowboy boots up on the table.  He had terrible manners, and instead of calling her friends by name, he addressed them as “hey, you.”

            Finally, her father said she had to make a selection.  The betrothal dinner table was set, with a place next to her for the proposed fiancé.  Nobody knew who it was going to be.  People looked around to see if they recognized any of the guests who were young men.  Finally, one of her loyal friends had the idea of going into the banquet hall and looking at the place card of her proposed fiancé at the table.  She looked at the card, but didn’t recognize the name.  Finally she saw that the millionaire’s daughter had written it herself.  It said, in her most beautiful script, “hey, you.”

Sometimes when your prospects look darkest, relief is on the way.  It may be subtle.  You know, the Creator took millions of years to make homo sapiens, so don’t expect your problems to be solved with a bolt of lightning.  But for those who believe, the wait seems less long.

I have a friend who lost her cable service with the electricity during the last hurricane.  She called Optimum, but their telephone service was never restored.  She told my wife, who got me to consult the internet on my computer.  I learned how to reboot your TV and conveyed the information to the friend.  Voila, after three weeks of a black screen she finally had her channels back.

Sometimes Providence works through our friends.  We are not social animals by accident.  There are those who think life is an accident.  If they knew how many pairs of things have to line up for us to have life, they would not be so reliant on accidents.  And besides,  who instituted accidents in the first place?

We called  him Charlie, but his real name was something similar in his native tongue, which still garbled his attempts to communicate in English.  But this did not hide the stories that attached to him, that he was a skilled craftsman once, a member of a European Guild that made treasures for the sitting rooms of the crowned heads of Europe.  But now he was past his skills, and despite a large and contributing family, daily life was something of a chore.

He had fallen right at his doorstep, spilling his blood from a gouge on the door handle all over the entranceway of the next door, and subsequent falls had elicited from his wife a complaint about caring for the “old man.”

Of course he didn’t deserve that as far as we know.  But an unnoticeable higher power must be aware of all this, for that power’s son said the hairs of the old man’s head are counted, and there is a justice that goes beyond everything we know, not necessarily here and now.  An almost eternal universe take its time to accomplish justice.