For the past decade, my parents, who divorced when I was an infant, have serendipitously both lived in Miami, about 10 miles apart. After years of working through the issues, effects and emotions of their early divorce, I now regard them not as parents accountable for my life's hardships, but rather as two extraordinary people, different in many ways, each possessing strength, wisdom and heart that are amazing gifts to me and to the world. Countless times have I made the drive back and forth between my parents' homes, able to experience and soak in the ineffable treasures of their presence and being.
Whatever loss I may have felt in my earlier life resulting from their divorce has been supplanted by a rich harvest of days and blessings. It is as if I am at a 10-mile long dining table, receiving sustenance and nourishment from both ends. With my father's recent passing, this commute has taken on a previously-unrecognized poignancy. Traversing the intervening neighborhoods evokes a cascade of sensation, an emotional sonata, as I pass between the mingled fields of parental love and history. Driving, I'm like a bow being pulled across the strings. Now, I am in the rondo, the third movement, where things that used to matter don't and things that never mattered do; where the mundane appears vivid and even the simplest, most ordinary routines become holy.
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