Seizing golden moments

Editor's note: This column originally was published Feb. 18, 2001.

Many years ago I ordered, from the American Home magazine, a clock-making kit. Oh, I didn't have to make the internal parts of the clock with all the little cogwheels. I had only to embroider on linen what was to be the face of the clock, attach it to a piece of plywood and fit it into the shadowbox frame. There was a little hole in the plywood and linen for a little bar of the clock to be pushed through upon which you attached the hands. These hands were gold. At least that was what we called these filigree decorated brass hands.

These hands dutifully made their way around the colorful embroidered flowers, fruit and Roman numbers.

Through some unthoughtful but felicitous action, a shelf for the clock was placed on a wall where the first rays of morning sunshine alighted on the golden hands. It is almost like a light had been turned on.

When Mama was staying with me she arose before daylight as did the rest of our farm-raised family and was ready to go with whatever projects she had planned for the day. These projects were usually piecing patchwork quilts or crocheting some beautiful piece of lace.

One morning after sunrise when I went in to have our devotionals and morning talk, she wasn't doing anything with her hands, was just staring at the clock. It scared me a little. "Watcha doin'?" I asked. Her reply, "Oh, just watching the golden moments go by," has been another guidepost for living that lies softly on my mind. Mama, of course, was watching the sunbeams on the golden clock hands, but I wonder if, in this fast-moving world today when the moments fly by so fast, we think of them as being golden and to be wisely spent. They aren't retrievable. If they come and go without our perceiving them, not even being alert for them to occur, we can't pile up very many as part of our riches.

"What golden moments do you remember, Mama?" "All of them," she replied. Then, becoming aware that I wanted a specific one, she described one. "One day I went down to the pawpaw patch. Sunlight was filtering through the green leaves as if to point out the fat green pawpaws still on the trees and the ripe ones that had fallen to the ground and there was a dozen or more black and white zebra butterflies around the feast before them. ..." Her voice trailed off as if she had returned to that golden moment and was mentally reliving it.

Later in life when I was studying butterflies I learned that zebra butterflies, although rather rare, can usually be found around fruiting pawpaw patches.

Every moment is a golden moment when you perceive that they are and you open to retrieving them. They illumine your mind.

Last week I came out of a store with yellow plastic bags full of purchases in each hand. I stood on the street side of a parked car watching for a break in the traffic before I attempted to cross the street. To the left of me the oncoming car had stopped. I looked to the right and saw that the oncoming car had stopped too, leaving me a broad empty space to cross over. Fleetingly a picture appeared in my mind where I've seen a mother wild turkey leading her little ones behind her in a wide space provided by voluntarily stopped traffic.

When I was across the street, I turned to wave my shopping bags at the two drivers. They responded with little acknowledging toots of their horns. It was a clump of golden moments. My mind was illumined with the thought that there are many good and caring people sharing moments in the time continuum of our lives.

This morning as I watched the sunbeams glitter on the golden hands I heard those doves I've been listening for. Lots of them now. The moment was golden because I felt an inner warmness that the world and all that is in it is marching or dancing to a rhythm that was put in place when the world was created.

REJOICE!

Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.