LETTERS FROM HOME: THANKS THAT EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OK NO MATTER WHAT

Nov. 23, 2000

Dear Adams family,

On Nov. 23, 1963, America was one day into mourning the death of John F. Kennedy. At 13, I was old enough to feel the historic gravity of those days and young enough to want normality -- the weekend football games on TV -- restored, as if that would mean everything was going to be OK.

Since then I have learned that everything is going to be OK no matter what happens.

It is as natural to die as it is to live. Souls are immortal, bodies are breakable. Even the mountain peaks we know have been there for millions of years had a birth and will someday disappear into the wind.

Today, give thanks for being alive at this moment to sense the Creation, this holiest of gifts.

In youth, we deprive our bodies of sleep and steep them in alcohol, seek out new ways to excite our minds and have little regard for our souls at all. In middle age, we begin to realize that our bodies, minds and souls require careful maintenance, like an exquisite car or house. We realize that to find answers we first must learn how to listen, we discover that our bodies and minds thrive on good nourishment and that our souls yearn for enlightenment the way the Earth yearns for the sun.

Waxing and waning, appearing and disappearing, everyday cycles repeat through years, lives, centuries and eons. All truths can be divined from nature.

Galway Kinnell's poem "Daybreak" steals my breath:

On the tidal mud, just before sunset,

dozens of starfishes

were creeping. It was

as though the mud were a sky

and enormous, imperfect stars

moved across it as slowly

as the actual stars cross heaven.

All at once they stopped,

and as if they had simply

increased their receptivity

to gravity they sank down

into the mud; they faded down

into it and lay still; and by the time

pink of sunset broke across them

they were as invisible

as the true stars at daybreak.

Yesterday I had lunch on Cherry Hill in Capaha Park, overlooking the baseball diamond Cape Girardeau teen-agers have danced upon for summers immemorial. It was empty, fenced up, dormant until spring.

On a kid-size diamond nearby, two men played pitch and catch with two children, a boy and a girl about 4 years old. When the children tired of bats and balls, everyone walked over to the tall green fence surrounding Capaha Field. The men boosted the children up then climbed the fence themselves. One by one they peeked over for a look at the past and the future.

Love, Sam