2013: A Year Spent In Presence

I’m looking back through the R&K entries we wrote this year, and it certainly ended up a different year than we expected. We’ve talked about it a bit here, and a bit more in our holiday Christmas letter, and friends and family know the whole story.. but it was an intensely humbling, difficult year. And I’m not going to rehash all that here as we recap 2013, R&K-style.

Truth is, the highlights of this year had little to do with successes and achievements and obstacles overcome in the typical type-A sense. Looking back, it seems to me that 2013 was a year of shared moments, of presence, where the only thing that make any of it worth a damned thing is that we were in it together, finding meaning in a common space. For good or bad. Personally, that’s how I’ll choose to remember this year.

Kristi and I toasting five years of marriage with our legs dangling off the side of a catamaran, watching dolphins dance by on a beautiful sunset sail along the Na Pali coast in Hawaii.

Starting the day for two weeks in Hawaii with a long swim in the warm crystal blue Pacific, hanging out with giant sea turtles.

Standing in line in San Francisco with our good friend Alicia this summer, waiting to see Neil Gaiman on his final book tour.

Family huddled together at the hospital at 5am one very cold January morning, as Kristi’s father Don was being rushed in after a massive heart attack that would have killed anyone else – but ultimately left him alive and well.

Attending the wedding reception of our good friends Laura and Bethany, shortly after the Supreme Court made it legal for them.

That evening at Concert in the Park, when the bunch of us collectively negotiated the obvious name for the soon-to-be daughter of our friends Lamar and Joy – the girl would simply have to be named Precious Panther. That was a really fun night, a very welcome break from some rough times in daylight.

Seeing and holding their beautiful baby – they insisted on naming their angel Solace, but what can you do – for the first time, and running their dog Beowulf ragged in our backyard to give them a little rest when their newborn came home.

Saying a final goodbye to our dog Sam, with the teary embraces of our vet techs and the hollow sense of empty when we left the vet’s office without him.

And there are more, of course. Weddings. Funerals. Gatherings of friends. Candid conversations in doctors offices. Fear and loathing, hope and illumination.

Those are only a few of the really memorable moments, emotional drilling points that reached down to the granite. Not all of them are fine and pleasing memories – some of them righteously sucked. But they all have made us more of who we are, deepened us emotionally, continually reminded us of what is most important in life. 2013 was a very humbling year, in every sense of the word.

When the Christmas season approached, we were limited in what we could do by the fact that we had little money. But inspired by the Advent Conspiracy, we set out to make it a season of presence rather than presents, of really being there. It’s really all we had to give.

Which kind of brings me to the highlight of my Christmas season. We gave our four-year-old niece Natalie and her little brother Ryan a “build a fort” kit – a drawstring bag with a few brightly colored flat sheets, some laundry line, clothespins, a flashlight, a cute little pink LED lantern. Once Natalie realized that “fort” meant “tent”, it became the home run present of 2013. She dashed upstairs to her room, wanting Kristi and I to help her build a tent.

For reasons I don’t pretend to entirely understand, I’ve lately started to become Fun Uncle in Natalie’s eyes, and she wanted some company in her new tent. So I climbed in after her and we read stories by flashlight with the room lights off, and Kristi hanging out outside the tent playing “the bear”, whose roaring menace could only be warded off with Natalie and her pink flashlight.

So 2013 was a good year. It wasn’t the year we wanted, and honestly we could do without another one like it for a while. But the moments made it all worth doing. Hope you can say the same as your 2014 gets off to a start.