We’ve been away – not for long but long enough to greet the familiar with newcomers’ eyes. Home is where coffee cups in the wrong cupboard bespeak a stranger’s presence – or where a broken walk-light has yet to be repaired; where the bedspread is tucked in OK, but not how we like.

Henry’s glad to see us – his gladness escalates to ecstasy as his realization of our return sinks in – but puzzlement lingers: Where have we been? So do I, come to think of it, recall periods of tot-dom when my parents were “away” – for a weekend perhaps: Where had they gone? Impermanence instigates doubt about our existential perimeters: If here and now aren’t everywhere and always, where else is there!

I’m always glad to come home. Trees and shelves remember: each has a tale to tell. Jane and I have lived other places but here since we began. How long has it been – twenty years? Impossible! Nowhere have I lived twenty years, not even my childhood home or the home of my children’s childhoods, yet those vanished places occupy eons, it seems, whereas here we’ve been only “since yesterday,” as the saying goes. Time plays tricks that way. A year isn’t a year: its length is measured both proportionally – what percentage of my total does this year represent? – and emotionally – what marvels and traumas has a year contained? Years that pass smoothly and sweetly seem hardly to have been. My years with Jane have been smooth and sweet, my first such.

Doing the math – seventy-two minus twenty – reels me into the story of my life. My story’s nearly done, there’s no gainsaying, and I’m curious, as if I were reading it or seeing it on a screen, to know what it’s meant. “Meant,” I admit, is the superimposition of folly – nothing “means” anything – yet humans are the story-telling species, retrospect an irrepressible dramatist. I disbelieve in significance and insist on it – go figure.

Human nature has not improved during my span. That is both surprise and disappointment. My age cohort was raised to trust progress – spiritual no less than material – and the spiritual, at least, has not occurred. The greed and stupidity of humanity, evident in every day’s headlines, dumbfounds me: was it always thus?

My own narrative describes an opposite trajectory. My soul is better now. I have learned, am learning still, about my status in eternity and how to be. Vanity and ambition still spasm occasionally – typing, I strive for glory: I can’t help it – I still stew about losing, let’s be charitable, a dozen pounds – but I know – in my still depths, deep beneath the roil of dailiness, I do not matter as an individual – none of us does – and for that reason matter immensely as one of my kind.   Humanity is an experiment in which we all participate: have I enhanced or impaired our eventual chances: has my participation even ever so slightly improved my time?

Thinking showed me the way. No oracle or pastor, no shock or shaking, but the slow steady progress of thought pointed me gradually toward what to make of my time and how to be. If a is true, then b, then c, so that’s how it is. Decency, kindness, truth, beauty, civility, grace – all the hues of love – make sense. Morality is not superstition – or preference – but the only solution to the equation of being if you’re figuring right. I know what’s just and true – pretty much – not because I’m smarter but because I’ve worked it out. I share my reasoning best I can.

It is good to be home.