Bongo

   Three friends of mine have recently started chemotherapy regimens, all within about week of one another. Three friends, from three different friend-circles, all facing challenging roads ahead. Each diagnosis is a jolting shock to these circles of friends, let alone these three and their families.  In a recent email exchange with a friend, I mentioned how life can be “unpredictably devasting” at times. She in turn commented that even though we know there will be unexpected, painful parts of life, those parts still always sting when we learn of them. We continue to be shocked and devastated each time we hear of a new diagnosis, or accident, or loss, newly surprised that bad things happen in life, or specifically in our circle of family and friends.
   As a kid, I remember we had a “Bongo Board” in our house. It was a wooden board, like a short skateboard, on top of a rolling wooden cylinder. The challenge was to stand on the board and balance it on the cylinder, which would roll back and forth under the board until you found just the right place where you could stand in a steady position. It was like a small, one-person teeter-totter, and it was a challenge. You could easily swoop to one side, try to compensate by leaning to the other side, end up teetering back and forth, or falling off completely. My brother Joe got good enough that he could stand on the Bongo Board, steadily balanced, and read a book. As I mastered balancing the Bongo Board myself, I tried then to purposefully lean to one side, keeping balanced, and then lean to the other side, and go back and forth a bit, while staying in control, and not falling off. It didn’t take much to send me tripping off to one side or the other - a slight move, too deep of a bend in one knee, a distraction. I hadn’t thought about the Bongo Board in a long time, but balancing all that life has thrown at us all lately brought it back to mind. There are days when I feel like I’m “bongoing,” as we called it, just fine. I’m steady, and even handling a few dips. And then there are other days. Like the days in which we learn of friends’ cancer diagnoses, a car accident, or house fire.
   And then there are days when I’m shocked, and taken back by the unexpected joys that appear from nowhere. During a walk in the woods recently, a yellow leaf dopped slowly in front of me. It was spinning around in circles as if an invisible thread, from sky to trail, went through the stem, while the leaf spun its way down the thread. As a native Vermonter, I’ve seen thousands of leaves fall during leaf peeping season, but never one like that. I was unexpectedly amazed as I stopped to watch this spinning yellow leaf.
  A few Fridays ago my daughter Molly was celebrating her thirtieth birthday. A big milestone for both of us. During our phone call the night before, she reminded me of the time she was born, 1:53 p.m., as I, in a very unmotherly way, can never remember those details about my daughters’ births. I promised to stop what I was doing at 1:53 the next afternoon to salute her and all that she’s added to this world in 30 years. It was a joyful moment at nearly 2:00 p.m. as I recalled being in the operating room at Weeks Medical Center and our friend, and OR nurse, Denise announced, “it’s Molly!” as she was born. We had picked out a name for a girl and a boy not knowing which would arrive.
   Later that afternoon, Molly received a phone call from the adoption agency that she had her husband Steve have been working with for over two years now, and she was told that she and Steve had officially been matched with a little guy from Thailand, who will now be joining our family within a year or so. That phone call was the best of joyful surprises!
   I don’t think we can, and it’s likely not wise to even try, to balance out our joys and our despair as if they carry equal weight. I don’t think we can even think of them in terms of comparable measures as if I’m trying to balance my life’s bongo board. But what I’ve come to realize is it will never likely to be stuck leaning totally to one side or the other. Life is mostly back and forth.