The next morning, the mess wasn’t a mess. The dining room table held its requisite scattering of crumbs and, on a gold paper plate, part of a chocolate chip cookie. The strings of a helium balloon bouquet were collapsed into a house plant, the balloons themselves having been sacrificed–at the end of the party– in service of vocal cord fun.
Down in the play room, where most of the young children had spent most of the evening, some kindly souls had replaced toys in their bins. Only a few toys remained out along with, mysteriously, the basket from the laundry closet in which I keep stray socks.
At about ten p.m. on the night of the party, I had made my way into the kitchen where two friends voluntarily busied themselves with dishes. It was mostly thanks to them that I had so little left on my hands in the morning: the balloon strings, the stove-top, some laundry.
The party had been meant to be outdoors. Outdoors is the only place in this house that can house over sixty people. And outdoors, in a North Carolina September, is a blissful place to be.
Unless the drizzle starts on Thursday, which it did, and absolutely will not stop, which it didn’t, well into Party Day.
We moved it inside.
Which meant Bill somehow preparing chicken for over sixty people everywhere but on the grill. And hoping that people would be comfortable when there aren’t nearly enough chairs. Not nearly.
But a decent party isn’t really about these things, I suppose. This party certainly wasn’t. This party was about a birthday–and surprise.
Everyone who has tried it knows that a surprise birthday party is a harrowing thing. Those weeks and days of planning are simply gorged with opportunities for failure: cats are forever trying to make their ways out of bags, and a thoughtless moment, an idle slip of the tongue will instantaneously and forever Ruin Things.
But as the day approached, we co-conspirators could sense that we had very nearly managed it, that we were about to Pull It Off. Mid-afternoon on party day, the birthday guy’s wife arrived with decorations and the almost certain knowledge that her husband had no idea. When she left again to fetch him, we were only a few hours away from Success, and still his ignorance was intact.
Guests arrived, following our careful instructions to Park Elsewhere, walking to our house in the rain, removing sodden shoes to beach towels laid down for the purpose. The house was packed, the dining room table crowded with the guests’ generous and delicious offerings. We blessed the meal with a prayer and commenced with supper–as per our instructions–and watched for the arrival of the birthday guy via cell phone.
I’m certain you know how it went. Mounting excitement. Multiple calls to gather near the door. Updates. Waiting. Repeated instructions to be quiet. Too many minutes until they’ll arrive–and then near-panicked preparation: how to greet him? How to effect the Moment of Surprise?
The Moment of Surprise. Although the party went on for hours afterward, although the house was brim-full of people I love and enjoy and was so glad to visit with, this Moment was It. And at very nearly the Last Moment, I realized that neither I nor any of our family should be the one to open the door. Instead, it should be the birthday guy’s father, because while the birthday guy knew his mother was in town for the weekend, he also knew that his father was unable to make it.
So having his father open the door was Absolutely What Needed to Happen.
And it did. And Birthday Guy was fully and completely surprised–to see his father and then to hear the rush of joy that greeted him: the cheers and laughter and the chorus of “Happy Birthday!”
That was my favorite part.
I’ve heard it said that our lives are comprised of moments. Maybe it was a Hallmark ad, but the notion strikes me as true. The moment you meet your spouse, your child, land your first job. But if we’re going to be honest, then we know that other moments count, too: when we decide again to forgive, when we choose to keep our mouths shut (or don’t). When we awake before our spouse and see him sleeping there and decide to love him again today–or we don’t need to decide that because this time it’s easy.
The moment when, work completed or not, we sit quietly on the front steps and listen to the wind turn the birch leaves. When we carry groceries from the car. When we wipe an unwilling baby’s nose or heat tea for an aging parent. When we watch a YouTube video under the elbow of a teenage son because he invited us to. When we exhale impatience because a child has beckoned us to “Look!” once again.
Moments. The smallest nicks of time.
One week before the birthday party, an old friend was buried in Massachusetts. He was younger than I by nearly a year, and I knew him best before he knew himself well–in those foggy middle-and high-school days when we were at church and youth group together. Which means, I know, that I didn’t really know him–not as the man, husband, father and friend he grew into.
So if his loss is terrible and devastating for me, how much worse–how much indescribably worse–for his parents and siblings, his friends, his wife, his sons?
They are left with things, I’m sure: the painfully difficult things that a loved one leaves behind. A bicycle, shoes. A scrawled grocery list. A closet and drawers of clothes that smell like him. Unbearably dear things.
And they are left with moments, memories that have returned and others that will come at them fresh and catch in their throats. All of them moments they will be desperate to remember. Nicks of precious, inadequate time.
After our recent party and the moment of surprise, it’s not the birthday guy I’m thinking of, but of Dave, this friend whose cancer wrenched him away just over a week ago. Of his life, comprised of moments, as is the way with all of us.
Like mine, Dave’s life hung on a moment: an agony subsuming all agony, incorporating it, taking it into Himself. Who but the most compassionate would do such a thing, with a cry would give up His Life, and then in a silent dawn, with unimaginable strength, would take it up again?
Which in turn gave to David another moment. His last one before escaping time’s grip and stepping into eternity.
What was it like, I wonder? To feel the pain finally leeching out of him, strength flooding a body made whole and entirely new?
What was that moment like, when the weary shreds of this broken world finally released him, and the way was opened? He was greeted, I’m certain, with a rush of joy, of welcome into the Life that we ache for, that this whole beautiful earth aches for.
And What (I long to see Him) was the Beautiful Face at the door?
