Come What May

And this from “On Work” by Kahlil Gibran:

“…And what is it work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.
It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,
And to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching.”

What day of the week welcomed you to this world? In searching, not having been very day-conscious at the moment of arrival, I discovered that Saturday opened its arms for me. What the nursery rhyme says about personality traits is certainly true for me. That alone is less important than the words of Gibran that follow. I have been lucky to “work with love.”

I’m thinking about this today because it is the official due date of my first grandchild. Were he to arrive today, looking less and less likely, he’d arrive on the same day as his parents, both of them Tuesday’s children, both of them, “full of grace.” I hear that word bandied about these days—grace—and perhaps because of its religious overtones, I tend not to use it.

When I think about the word and consider its range, I realize that my two “Tuesday’s children” also embody their nursery rhyme characterizations fairly well. They were married on a Tuesday, also, in the middle of the redwoods during the pandemic surrounded by their immediate families, 11 of us. It remains an experience of grace.

When I consider the poem’s descriptions of Wednesday’s and Thursday’s children, my superstitious self says, “Bide your time, little guy. There’s no rush,” even though what Thursday promises and what life delivers in abundance, the opportunity to grow, a journey—and long at that, seems mostly positive.

This morning one of my brothers called to wish us all luck; another showed up unexpectedly at our door yesterday saying, “Give them a squeeze for us,” and my sister? already planning on our joint babysitting, auntie and gamma together from the beginning.

With that in mind, I’ll take a Wednesday’s child. To worry about what woe life predictably delivers can only fade in the face of all this support, all this love.