That winter my father and I got a small blue spruce from the grocery. In the house it was dying so we read on the Internet how to plant it outside.
He let me pick the spot.
MY FATHER: Now if it dies it’s your fault.
We laughed.
Our hill was steep and slanty so we had to think how to get the tree straight. We put a tall stick beside it and walked away to see if our stick was straight up and down. We got down and looked from two different directions. Then we pointed the tree like the stick.
ME: Will it be all right through the winter? In the snow?
He tipped his head. He didn’t know.
In late spring our soccer ball rolled down to that corner and I saw our tree again. It had a new stalk four inches tall.
MY FATHER: Wow, yeah. How can you tell that stalk is new?
ME: It’s lighter? More blue I mean?
MY FATHER: Yeah, what else?
ME: It’s crooked. A little.
MY FATHER: What’s crooked? The stalk?
ME: The tree.
MY FATHER: Maybe the tree got the stalk crooked?
ME (laughing): No way.
MY FATHER: What’s so funny? It can’t be the tree’s fault?
I laughed.
MY FATHER: How can a tree be smarter than two humans?
ME: The sun.
We laughed.
He wanted to hug me into the air and fly me in a circle like we used to, but the ground was slanty and soggy, I was getting too big, and he was getting too old.
Look how the sun looks at everything, he said later.
The sun does not ask what he’s getting back and then go where he gets the best returns for his trouble. He doesn’t go where things are greener, things get greener where he goes.
Forget deserving. The sun comes to the deserving and the undeserving just the same.
When he was in school he loved the idea of the Trinity, he said. It was the ultimate brainy challenge. But later in life you want a belief that can walk through every hour of your day with you, between you and everyone you meet, close at hand if a phone call wakes you at three in the morning and one of your kids might be in trouble.
One gray rainy week we came out of the grocery hurrying to the car. Because of the rain there were shopping carts everywhere, tipped on their sides in the planters.
Suddenly everything lit up. The scattered shopping carts, the wires between battered light poles, the planters littered with receipts and candy wrappers.
We both stopped to look, and looked at each other and laughed. Nothing had changed but everything was different. In a puddle I saw a slow whirl of colors. The sun had come through a gap in the cloud cover and made everything new.
The good in your life is like that, except the light comes from you and you choose when.
You have that sun in you anywhere, however slanty and soggy the ground.
Send that light ahead wherever you look.
That’s the one thing you can always control: what you give. You get exactly what you give, on the spot. No waiting or wondering. You cannot be cheated.
Make that your one law, law to all laws.
Love like the sun.
I’m making a riddle he would like.
Only lift your hand and it opens for you. Only look and you find it. Only ask and it is yours.
What is it?
Answer:
That door you reach for is your own.
You open it to look out.
The light pouring through comes from you, from the love behind the search for love.
He would guess it, I’m guessing.