Tonight I Ate A Cannoli

The house is brimming with boxes. The rooms are looking bare. Closets have been emptied and my body is worn. The emotions of leaving this house of memories insist on rising to the surface and my eyes overflow at the slightest provocation. Change, they say, is good, but I find as I grow older that it is also hard.

When we are young, we jump into new challenges with the fierceness of a young tiger, and that’s as it should be. It is the time for such things.  But when we grow a little older, when life has tempered us a bit with it ups and it downs, its hurts and its helps, its joys and its judgments, we become a little more hesitant. It is at these times that we hearken back to our youth, to the parents we miss and the comforts of the known.

And so, this morning, while on my early morning trip to U-Haul for a few more boxes, I found myself stopping off at the bakery to pick up a cannoli. When all the packing was done for the day, I would sit down and have a cup of nice, hot coffee and enjoy a cannoli as I thought of mom and dad and life in general —- of changes and growth and not letting one’s self become stagnant. Of stepping out of our comfort zone and seeing what comes up on the other side of that.

I thought of my parents, of their adventurous move to the country, leaving their known for the snowy winters of upstate New York, the comforts of the city for the discomfort of the country. Many considered it a poor trade, but I don’t think they did —-no, I don’t think they ever did. They taught us so much with their adventurous spirits and as I sit here, drinking my coffee and eating my cannoli, I am still learning from them.

Josef Pieper, in his little book of essays, Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation, states that ‘man’s ability to see is in decline’. He is right and he made this statement over sixty years ago. It is the price of a culture full of so many ‘advantages’ that we are unable or unwilling to step off the precipice and let God catch us. We fool ourselves into thinking we must be and always are in control.

Tonight I ate a cannoli and as I did, I stepped off the precipice, following my parents and other adventurers into the world of the unknown, the world of change, leaving the familiar to step delicately and carefully into new experiences, new surroundings, new challenges, not because I needed to, but because I chose to, falling headlong into the future and whatever it brings.