When MCF first announced his current blog party, my gut reaction was that I wasn't going to participate this time. The thing is, when it comes to blog parties, my goal is almost always to make a mockery of the thing. That's not because I dislike MCF or his blog; quite the opposite, his blog is one of my five or six daily must-reads. It's just that the topics he posits often provoke some serious introspection in me… and I am just no good at serious introspection. It makes me uncomfortable.

So instead of trying to come up with serious answers, I usually write something silly. If MCF asks where your five favorite places, I write about my house. If MCF asks what we'd wish for if we were granted three wishes, I make butt jokes. Etc, etc.

I do this partly because comments along the lines of "You so funny!" really feed my ego. Mostly, however, I do this because writing seriously about personal topics is difficult for me. Except for religion, I really never blog about serious elements of my personal life. Chalk it up to insecurity, I guess. It's a self defense thing.

So when MCF announced this blog party's topic, What Are The Best Things In Your Life That Have Returned, I immediately set about trying to think of a way to make a shambles of the thing. But I couldn't. I couldn't think of a funny way to approach the topic. All I could think about were things that I'm truly grateful for; things that have made my life better in their returning. So, as I said, I didn't figure I'd participate. It's only now, at the last minute, that I've decided to go ahead and jump in. Please excuse me for dispensing with my usual travesties this time. The things listed below (and, with the exception of the first one, they are listed in totally random order, so as not to assign priorities) are things I am truly grateful for.

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• My Faith
  
  "When I was young I spoke like a child, and I saw with a child's eyes." So sings Mary Chapin Carpenter in my favorite of her songs. I can remember being very young… and I mean young… four or five years old… and having total and complete faith in the love of God, the eternity of Christ, and the basic goodness of the universe. I don't remember when that changed. I can remember a few early incidents, though. I remember a Sunday school teacher who told us kids that God only wanted to hear serious prayers and that we were in danger of hell if we prayed for things like our cats and dogs. I realize as an adult that this Sunday school teacher probably had mental problems… but as a child who saw all adults as authority figures, I believed what I was told.
  
  Growing up in a fundamentalist family was all wrong for a child with my particular sensitivities. I'll leave it at that. By the time I was a teenager, I'd decided that whatever God there may be was probably cold, emotionless, and totally irrelevant to our lives. To the extent that I believed in a God at all, I was a Deist… but I was most comfortable calling myself an agnostic. Any ideas at all about God, as I saw it, could only lead to heartache, confusion, and general discontent.
  
  After 9/11, I decided, like many people, that it might be time to get back to the stability of church life. Our family started attending a local fundamentalist Church… and it wasn't long before the old bitterness and dejection came back. Thankfully, somewhere along the way, somebody recommended a C.S. Lewis book to me, and I actually read it. It had a snowball effect on me. I read all the Lewis I could get my hands on and I began to feel that the great theologian was speaking directly to me, confirming for me that the feelings I'd had about religion weren't weird or inappropriate… and, eventually, I began to feel that Lewis was pointing me in a specific direction. Wendy and I began to investigate Roman Catholicism. I've written about it ad nauseam here at the blog.
  
  Now, at the age of 37, I am a Roman Catholic regular attendee of Mass. Christ said that to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, we must become as little children. I'm working on it.




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• My Anchor
  
  Wendy and I met over the internet through the usenet group dedicated to fans of the writer Kurt Vonnegut. We both went through divorces at the same time, and our internet friendship became more and more important to both of us during that time. Eventually, we decided to meet in person, and one day I made the long drive from Virginia to the small town in Pennsylvania where Wendy lived. We hit it off immediately. I'd never met anyone with whom I had such immediate and compelling chemistry. For a little more than a year, Wendy and I dated long distance… each of us making trips when our schedules allowed, seeing each other about once a month or once every six weeks.
  
  It wasn't ideal, of course. Eventually, we decided that we might be expecting too much of ourselves. We decided to take a break from the "long distance relationship," to test ourselves individually and see if finding new relationships locally was what was right for us. We didn't see or talk to each other for about two months. I was miserable. Finally, one of us got back in touch with the other (I honestly can't remember which) and about three months later, Wendy moved to Virginia. We've been together for six years now and will celebrate our second wedding anniversary this October. We don't have a perfect marriage, we have our problems and our issues to deal with. Nonetheless, our marriage is built on a love that was tested by a year-long, 350 mile gap. It ain't perfect, but it is the real thing.




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• My Son
  
  There just ain't no other way to put it, divorce is a bitch. If you've ever been through that, you know that. It's especially hard if the couple divorcing has children. When my ex-wife and I split up, the hardest part was working out custody of our son. Legally, we got joint custody, with her as primary physical custodian. That meant that, if she moved, our son moved with her. And, of course, about a year after we divorced, she moved. She and I live about two hours apart. By our current custody agreement, I get to spend almost every weekend with my son. So, every Friday, my reason for living and breathing returns to me… if only for the weekend.




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• My Brother
  
  He ain't my brother biologically. We didn't even meet until we were in our late teens… but he's my brother and I know that as sure as I know that I'm sitting here. My brother and I have been through pretty much everything together. We were each the other's drinking buddy during years of ignorant alcohol abuse. We were there for each other each time one of us got dumped by the latest "girl I'll never get over." Over the past twenty or so years there've been more fishing trips, road trips, and heart-felt conversations than I can begin to remember.
  
  My brother and I had a falling out after each of us got married. It came down to one simple thing: I thought I knew everything, I thought I knew what was best for him, me, and everyone else, and I finally ultimately pushed him away with my BS. We didn't see each other or talk for a few years. Then, during my divorce, I started attending AA meetings and really examined my life. What had I lost along the way? How much of what I'd lost was really indispensable, and could any of it be recovered? I sat down and wrote my brother a letter admitting that I'd been an ass and asking him for his forgiveness and telling him how much I missed and needed his friendship. Ever read the parable of the Prodigal Son? That's how he took me back. Total forgiveness, total acceptance, and absolute enthusiasm about forgetting the past. There are so many wonderful things in my life that I don't deserve. My brother is high on that list.




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• My Dog
  
  When she was a puppy… about ten months old… Tilda got sick. Really, really sick. She wouldn't eat, she kept throwing up and having diarrhea… and she kept passing out. We'd only had her for about seven months, but realizing that she was about to die really drove home how much we'd gotten attached to that dog. We took Tilda to the vet, and he couldn't figure out what was wrong with her. He tried everything he could think of, drugs, treatments… even exploratory surgery. Nothing helped. She was dying. She was dehydrated and starving and she couldn’t eat or drink. She was a goner. The vet put her on an IV, but he basically let us know that the IV wouldn't be enough, and he started preparing us for the worst.
  
  Then, for some reason that neither the vet nor our family understood, Tilda began a slow recovery. For eleven days she stayed at the vet's office on an IV. She went from being unable to even sit up to sitting up and then standing up. One day the vet came in to check on her and she barked at him. That bark, for us, was like a miracle. I prayed to God for the life of that dog, something I'd have been afraid to do when I was a child in a fundamentalist home. I prayed, and I promised God that if the dog got better, not only would I start allowing her on the couch, I'd give her the couch.
  
  Slowly, Tilda recovered… and, eventually, she came home. She'd lost something like twelve pounds, a huge weight loss for a dog of her breed and size. But, slowly, she regained her health and her vitality.
  
  Today, Tilda is three and a half and she has the energy and attitude of a puppy.
  
  She really enjoys her couch.




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• My Cat
  
  When I was a kid, we had a cat named Tiger. He was the coolest, most dignified cat I've ever known. He was unshakable. He took everything in stride. He was affectionate, but very distinguished about it. He was just a really cool cat.
  
  When he was five or six years old, Tiger got out of the house one evening and he was just gone. We drove all over the neighborhood looking for him, we tried the signs and classified ads, we did everything we could to get him back. Nothing doing. He was just gone. After about three months we gave up and got a new kitten.
  
  One morning, my mother came home from a graveyard shift at the hospital, and Tiger was waiting for her, sitting on the front porch. He was glad to see her and showed it with all the usual purring and leg-rubbing. He had obviously had quite an adventure during his three month sabbatical. All the whiskers on one side of his face were missing, and he had another animal's toenail embedded in his head. God only knows what he'd gotten into, but he'd clearly gotten it out of his system. We took him to the vet to get him checked over, to get that toenail removed… and, while he was at it, we had the vet remove a couple of other things.
  
  Tiger lived to be about eighteen years of age and spent the rest of his life basking in windows around the house. Now and then, stray cats with his distinctive yellow tabby pattern would show up in the neighborhood. I like to think that his bloodline is still out there.