Lazy Sunday Afternoons

The sun is out, hardly a cloud in the sky; the cat is curled up on her little perch in the window right in front of me while her "open to the world," just to my right, has a few bird calls coming in (a crow, just as I was writing this). I'm finishing a mug of tea and will put some 30's and 40's music on the CD machine.

It is, indeed, a lazy Sunday afternoon in the spring.

I have a sense that the fullness of our life, the part that begins after we are freed of our bodies (i.e.: die) will be a lazy Sunday afternoon in the spring, where there is no clock and the sun never sets. A day when we can just "be." That's the definition of eternity; not something which has a calendar infinitely thick, but only one page which says, "Now." We can stroll through the gardens, visit with friends old and new, wonder at the marvels of creation and never have to worry that "it's getting late."

There we are, chatting with Albert Einstein, understanding every concept he explains; then we run into our great-great-grandfather, who tells us what it was like growing up in his country and coming to ours, all the stories and the good times. We wander into groups and individuals, all fascinating. And it's still "now," it never gets too late; it's always a lazy Sunday afternoon in the spring.

Back here in the reality of May 7, 2006, I have a radio program to put together, some other work to do and it has to be done by this evening. But I look forward to that Sunday afternoon when my mother can tell me, in great detail, what it was like as a teenager to accept a dare from her girlfriend and take a ride with a barnstormer in his biplane around the airfield at a penny-a-pound rate. Then later to break the news to her mother.