“Enjoy every sandwich,” Warren Zevon, after being asked about being diagnosed with terminal cancer

We’ve begun the disentanglement of living here in Arizona.

One of the few absolute truths in the world is that all things must come to an end. And so it is with our three-year (almost) experiment in Arizona.

The house is empty. We spent our last night there. And tomorrow we head off for a less-than-direct route back to Rhode Island.  

As I am wont to do, I often think of things as beginnings and endings. It is just the way my mind works. As we drove along the road to the hotel for the night before our journey, it occurred to me how different my perspective on the area was from when I arrived here.

Things once unfamiliar have become lost in the familiarity of everyday life. Some say familiarity breeds contempt. I think otherwise. I believe familiarity breeds understanding and helps alleviate our fear of differences. It can calm our evolutionary heritage of fearing the unknown.

I don’t know if I will ever return here. While we still own the house (with this market, selling was impossible, so it is rented) I’m not sure in this age of online everything if I even have to return to sell it.

But I may want to see how things that seemed never to change when you are so close to them change with startling rapidity.

As so it will be when I return to the homeland of Rhode Island. While I have been back for funerals–the one sad reality of approaching the completion of seven decades–I haven’t had time to see all the familiar places where I spent many years.

They will remind me that,

Every moment of every day.

Every breath.

Every heartbeat.

Every sunset, sunrise, starry sky, rainy day, snowy night. Every step one takes brings one closer to the last one.

This is not to be melancholy or fatalistic, but the reality is that everything, every single entity in existence, has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Every day also brings new experiences. New opportunities. New faces. One needs to recognize this reality, embrace it, and enjoy every moment.

My favorite Bible Verse…I’ll pause here for those who know me to recover…Ready? Believe it or not, I have a favorite Bible verse, Ecclesiastes 3 1-8

To everything there is a season,
and a time for every purpose under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to break down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,

a time to search and a time to count as lost,
a time to keep and a time to discard,

a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

To be honest, I don’t use the King James Version or any of the other more common versions, although I have read several. My new project is the recently uncovered Ethiopian version. For moments like this, I use the Pete Seeger version as performed by the Byrds. But it is a legitimate Bible Verse.

Tomorrow, we will take our last steps in Arizona, at least for the immediate future, and use some of our remaining time to venture through areas of the country we haven’t yet experienced.

They will seem new and unfamiliar, I hope they won’t remain that way.

One step after the other, my friends, one step after the other.

And while the ancient saying goes “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” ours will start with the air conditioning on high and some suitable travel music.

But as soon as the weather cooperates, the windows are open…