“It takes the rare spirit to convince them to flock with those unlike them.” – Gregory Maguire
This evening marks what is the first grown-up dinner party that I am throwing for the twins and their guests. It’s a bit early (my first attendance at an adult dinner party was when we were planning Suzie’s return from her exchange year in Denmark which was when I was about seventeen) but at fourteen the twins are already growing up faster than anyone wants to admit.
When they asked what the dress code was, I blurted out ‘casual elegant‘ since that seemed like the easiest thing to do, in my particular mind, which may not be the mindset of the average teenager – but who the hell wants to be average? Let’s lift it. And so it’s an outfit of sequins for me, to highlight a sparkling theme as we near the finale of the year. There are a few surprises in store, some conversation sparkler-starters, and the requested comfort food dinner of macaroni and cheese (Patti LaBelle’s Over the Rainbow Mac and Cheese to be precise).
Watching the twins grow up has been one of the joys of my life – and with little Jaxon just starting out on his journey we’re not done yet. If there’s one thing I hope they pick up from their crazy Uncle Al, it’s that they keep their hearts and minds open to people who may be different from them, that they forge their own paths of goodness and decency even when it’s not popular or accepted, and that they always try to do what’s right even when it’s not the easiest way.
“Watching the world wake up, dress itself in the dark, take on its daily guise, reminds me of how we fathom human character when we encounter someone at a distance, at a gallop, in the shadows. We get no more than a quick glance at the man on the street, the child in the woods, the witch at the well, the Lion among us. Our initial impression, most often, has to serve.
Still, that first crude glimpse, a clutch of raw hypotheses that can never be soundly clinched or dismissed, is often all we get before we must choose whether to lean forward or to avert our eyes. Slim evidence indeed, but put together with mere hints and echoes of what we have once read, we risk cherishing one another. Light will blind us in time, but what we learn in the dark can see us through.
To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.” ~ Gregory Maguire
