Some might go to Times Square or the virtual equivalent
to celebrate the New Year, but the night before we celebrated by seeing, again,
A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee at Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, taking our son Jonathan, and his friend, Anna. We normally see the previews of Dramaworks'
productions, but Bill Hayes, the Producing Artistic Director of the Theatre and
the Director of this particular production challenged us to see the play later
in its run. One can indeed see its
maturation as a drama, especially the complex dialogue and character
interaction coming even more together. But as a philosophical statement, it had
the same profound impact on me, about families and about life. I shuttered when Agnes says, "Time happens, I suppose,... To people
... Everything becomes...too late, finally. You know it's going on ... up the
hill; you can see the dust, and hear the cries, and the steel ... but you wait;
and time happens. When you do go, sword, shield ... finally ... there's nothing
there ... save rust; bones; and the wind."
Those words came flooding back to me as the New Year
began on a heartbreaking note, learning that a friend is entering hospice. Too upsetting to write about now, but this panoramic
photograph sort of expresses my feeling, one I had remembered taking earlier in
the year when a "Supermoon" was rising in May. There are spectacular images of this event on
the web, the moon truly dominating the landscape, but this one is the opposite,
conveying the vastness of our world, and, ultimately, the solitary nature of
our journey. Time happens....
