Merry Christmas. I hope, if possible, you have the opportunity to be surrounded and in the embrace of the love of family and friends. And that this is not just for today, but for all days. Perhaps if we all concentrated on living the message of the Christmas Story on a daily basis, the annual observation of the event would come easier for us.
Four days ago, thanks to the global village and world wide connectivity (brought to me by the same military-industrial complex we normally blame for all the evils of the world (real and and/or imagined), to include the music of Celine Dion and Buckner booting that easy grounder), I had a facebook email (Or do they have their own name for that, perhaps facemail?) friend request from someone whose name I did not recognize but who listed my wife as a friend.
This one was easy since I see Sigrid, my wife, on a daily basis (the apartment isn't all that big and I know many of her usual hiding places) and she shared with me the friend request was from her former best friend and matron of honor at our wedding, damals, Evelyn F, now with a new last name as she and Rick F had gone their separate ways and each had remarried. She is now living back in Germany, only a couple of hours south of where she had grown up and was just starting out on her World Wide Wander.
Two days later, I had email from a person from Port Arthur, Texas, who had stumbled upon this gibberish the night before via a search engine into which she had entered the names of her Godparents from many years ago-their names had turned up in an entry I had written about the day Sigrid and I had married. Michelle G, the woman from Port Arthur, wrote she had been looking for this couple for over a decade and wondered if the people I had mentioned might, indeed, be the object of her search.
To tell you the truth, I had and have no idea if our Evelyn and Rick are hers, too. I know, especially today, how I'd like the story to turn out. Because of a variety of threads, all woven invisibly together, seemingly at random, I was in a position to relay her note, via my wife, to Evelyn and maybe brighten more than just one person's Christmas. Sort of like the First Christmas, except for the animals, the shepherds in the fields, The Star with Royal Beauty Bright, Pentium II computer chips, dial-up modems and, most importantly, the manger, The Mother and Child. Merry Christmas.
-bill kenny
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