Monday, April 22, 2013

Pentecost Prayer Day 20

We just celebrated out twentieth anniversary of marriage with a trip to the beach offered us by our next-door neighbors, both highly passionate people. It was pure magic experiencing their joyful abandon in expressing their emotions to each other, no matter who may be watching. Maite, who is from Venezuela with all the passion that one can imagine that entailing, and thirteen years my junior, serenading each other and our spouses every chance we got.

We were joined for different celebrations by others of great passion. T. Sue, another friend ten years my junior, romped with us on the beach, as excited by seashells as if we were all six-year-old schoolgirls. My brother Bill made, for my belated birthday gift, an ice cream cake that was the most amazing rendition of this dessert I had ever encountered: three flavors of cake enveloping three flavors of ice cream, wrapped in three flavors of icing. He joined us for a supper of New Orleans style red beans with andouille sausage. This creative concoction was a fine finish from a fabulous brother.

We had a bit more cake that we could consume, as the original creation must have weighed in at thirty pounds. We took the rest to T. Sue's family, which had relocated to Florida from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, where we were enthralled by her delightful ten-year-old daughter's piano solo, her son's delightful manners and wit, and her husband's hospitality and joy in showing off the garden that he and T. Sue have created, as well as sharing her culinary skills with us.

We sang, danced, laughed, ate, and drank with great gusto. I'm now twenty years younger than when we left for Florida one week ago tomorrow. Some emotions simply need to be sung, some cried out to the heavens, some embraced with such physical strength that they seem ready to crush us unless we wrap others in our arms. My prayer for Pentecost is that we all learn to be at peace with our passions and comfortable passing them on to others.