Hello, Friends!

Among the wonderful stories emerging about the life of Lady Bird, there are a couple that stand out as exceptional, for what they say about her marvelous humanness.

Lady Bird wasn’t perfect, whatever that means, and her daughters are able to celebrate some of her character traits that loved ones might have found challenging to live with, over the years.

For one thing, she was notoriously “frugal,” to put it mildly. When Lyndon didn’t know where she was, he would say she was “out somewhere trying to save a dime on a can of beans.” The exception seems to have been her grandchildren and great-grands, who experienced their Mimi’s largesse, and indulgent generosity. One one of their trips, one chirped,“The Savoy! That’s where we stayed with Mimi!”

Lady Bird was also known for her ferocious, unrelenting work ethic. She never really took a holiday, in the sense of being completely off duty, apart from trying to accomplish something useful, or experience something uplifting. Time was precious, and not to be wasted, and she made sure her family’s lives were full of all kinds of worthwhile doings.

If one of her children complained about wanting to “just take a vacation,” Lady Bird made sure she found something that could be both fun and enlightening—but fun had to include doing something, not just “lollygagging.”

Lately I’ve been remembering some aspects of my own mother’s character that “rounded out” her human nature, so to speak. I’ve recalled instances in which her “strong-mindedness” crossed over my comfort boundaries and seemed more like stubbornness, or bossiness. When Robbie Currie believed she was right, she had a way of making it clear that the rest of us should come around to her point of view, too. And she wasn’t shy about letting folks know where she stood on issues that mattered to her, even if that meant ruffling feathers or occasionally stepping on toes.

In other words, my mom was human—and thank God for that.

I’m missing her a lot these days, and among the things I miss most are those parts of her personality that used to drive me mildly crazy—maybe because I recognize some of those same tendencies in my own nature.

In celebrating a life, any life, it’s good to remember to give thanks for everything, for every minute, as Lady Bird is said to have been able to do, and to embrace the whole person, the whole story, in our recollection, and our understanding of what it means to make this mortal journey in human skin.

That gives those of us still on this side of things a bit of breathing room, don’t you think? Maybe it inclines us to treat each other and ourselves with a bit more gentleness, a bit more humor, a bit more of Christ’s spirit of all-embracing inclusiveness.

I’m grateful, today, that Lady Bird and my mom were alive—and I’m grateful to be alive, to remember to cry, laugh, and accept life as the gift that it is.

I look forward to living with you this Sunday, and all our days to come.

Shalom,

Sarah