Up

Journal for Christa—

We watched Up last week. Billed as a children’s movie, it’s anything but. I saw a lot of people I’ve known in Up—people who desperately wanted children and couldn’t, people who passed away long before this world was ready to let them go. I saw myself. It’s really a story of life—the bad, the good, the fleeting.

It’s a story of promises made but not quite kept, of noticing the joy in the mundane, of rebounding when things just don’t turn out like you expect. It’s about the human spirit, a residual—I think—of being created in God’s image.

In story we sometimes get the idea that what makes life significant are the adventures—great vacations, important discoveries, changing the world; and we forget to paint a dream on the wall, to look at the person we’re eating with, to gaze at the clouds, and to dance around the room.

Up isn’t just about relationships, it’s also a story about letting go—of knowing when to move on from the past, the familiar, the comfortable—of when to grasp a new adventure.

Though it wasn’t what I expected, I liked Up, and my favorite part was when the old, childless man realized something the father never did: the immense value of sitting on the curb, counting red cars.

Chris, Stef, Flora, and Scout were here this week. We didn’t “do” anything. Jay and Flora ran the train around the Christmas tree, we ate tons of food, we visited with friends and lots of family. It was a wonderful week. I graded not one paper, only looked at French briefly, and took Flora out to the ponds to see the fish “sleeping.”

Now today, the train sits silently under the tree, and research papers sit in my gmail box. It’s time to move to the very ordinary things of life. But, Saturday we’ll go dancing.