I have decided once again to participate in #AdventWord, the global online Advent calendar sponsored by Virginia Theological Seminary. Today is the first day of Advent and a wonderful day to return to my sadly neglected blog.
Unexpected is a strange and serendipitous choice for the first Advent Word of 2019. I call it strange because expectation is the very essence of Advent. In my many writings about my favorite season of the liturgical calendar, I have often pondered the appropriateness of the Spanish word esperar as the perfect expression of the Advent trinity: to wait, to hope, to expect. But now we are asked to reflect on precisely its opposite: not expectation (and its brothers, waiting and hoping), but its absence. And therein lies the serendipity of the choice.
For just yesterday, my husband, two dogs, and I returned from a Thanksgiving weekend excursion whose joys were, for me, in the realm of completely unexpected. Through most of my adult life, I held fast to the mantra that whatever adventures I might embark on, I would sleep in a bed at the end of each day. I have broken that pledge on a few occasions that admittedly offered unforeseen moments of magic–mostly sunrises and a few sunsets on the coastal plain and the coast of North Carolina.
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- Lake Mattamuskeet the first day
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- Lake Mattamuskeet the second day
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- Bear Island/Hammocks Beach State Park
When I first started working as a disability examiner for Social Security, we had no desktop computers, just Wang terminals; nor could we communicate via email, just intraoffice messaging whose default was “reply all.” Hence, I established a wide reputation for pedantry early on. The topic was one on which I have often pontificated in the intervening thirty-plus years. One of the system administrators reached outside his bailiwick and sent the following message to everyone at Disability Determination Services; I still don’t know if it was meant as a challenge or a request for information:
As I began to ponder the year soon coming to a close, it seemed necessary and fitting that I end the longest hiatus of my blog-writing career with a brief narration of the project–now complete–that has consumed my life for the last four years. During that time, I have focused much of my attention on the effort to commemorate, both personally and professionally, the centenary of World War I. Not coincidentally, I last posted here on November 11, one hundred years after the Armistice ending the ghastly war that gave us the map, the context, and even the vocabulary by which we still understand the ensuing century. As that project came to its logical conclusion during those frenzied days of early November, I realized that I could take the time to breathe, to collect my energies, and to move onto as-yet undetermined paths. So today, I am taking the opportunity to review this project as it came to fruition in 2018–focusing primarily on the last few events that provided me with a sense of fulfillment like no other. 