LETTERS FROM HOME: WELCOMING THE HUBBUB AND SILENCE

Dear Patrick, Arlene, John, Erin, Peter, Duke, Emily, Angela, Dominick, Tom, Christine and little ones,

Happy Thanksgiving, Adams family. DC and I are back in Missouri and looking forward to spending the day with our own families. In our two adulthoods, that's probably happened on Thanksgiving only a handful of times.

I always will remember the Thanksgivings with you in Southern California, all that love being passed between the crowded tables along with the turkey and dressing. It was the Waltons West. The Waltons with surfboards and electric guitars, complications, college educations and identity crises. You got that bonding thing down. One family value: Love one another, no matter what. Just as your faith teaches.

We're having two Thanksgivings. The first version with DC's parents and clan about an hour away at their cabin on the Castor River. Should be very rosy-cheeked. Later we'll be back in Cape Girardeau with the Blackwells, where in the old days the sound made when linebackers collide with running backs didn't always come from the TV.

Now, the hubbub of children is usually missing from the house I grew up in, but for Thanksgiving they will number eight altogether. Six nieces, a nephew and a cousin who seems more nephew. They have most of the ages from 4 to 12 covered.

Some of them have developed a taste for Wiffle Ball. Coincidentally, I like it too. The littlest girls enjoy a game based on their belief that if they jump off the stairs Uncle Sam will catch them. So far so good.

But who knows? We haven't played it since last year. Children are the most changeable and adaptable creatures. We'd be better off if we aspired to be more like them.

To be happy one moment and sad the next is a natural, spontaneous response to life, but we look on such behavior as moody or even...childish. Age hardens our views with our arteries until senility turns us back into children.

Most adults think that's pitiable. I cannot discount the difficulty for one who has lived 70, 80 or 90 years and once more can't find their shoes. But I wonder if what has been restored might be more precious than what has been lost.

DC and I have been visiting a friend in a nursing home. The lobby usually is filled with people in wheelchairs. Their faces slowly turn as we enter and we smile, but they don't smile back so we hurry through to our friend's room.

Of course, they have nothing to smile about, living out the end of their lives with strangers in a strange place that seems to be made of concrete and tile and antiseptic. The penalty for growing old.

Perhaps they view us as children do, as alien beings, big ones, that walk in and out of their lives every once in awhile and make them do things they usually don't want to do.

Or maybe the reality of the aged is a synthesis of childhood and adulthood -- playfulness and wisdom, enthusiasm and understanding, guilelessness and forgiveness. Soul work.

That's the thing about living where real winters are. The appearance of lifelessness is just a stage, the natural world reminds you. A time for re-evaluation and recapitulation and yes, regression. All necessary or the next stage could never be.

But now comes the harvest of kisses and hugging, and thankfulness for life in all its squalor and beauty. And for pumpkin pies that only last winter were seeds.

Love, Sam