The Four-tunate Year

The current issue of TIME features the 100 most influential people in the world. As always, it is fascinating to learn more about those who shape life for the rest of us. But, as Uncle Albert demonstrated, everything is relative. The two most influential people in my life are Mom and Dad, and to expand the number to one-hundred would be a simple game of six degrees from them. It is true that this trek home is self-indulgent to the point of being narcissistic, but I keep hoping that I may somehow convey the understanding that my memories are representative of billions more. Every child is born into this world believing that her or his experience is “normal”, which makes the countless other experiences “abnormal” from the personal vantage. As I developed physically and psychologically during those critical early years, I began to realize that being a preacher’s kid wasn’t all that normal. No one else’s father preached from the pulpit each Sunday. No one else lived in the parsonage next door to the church. No one else had the love and devotion of my mother. But it was normal to me because it was all I knew. And without any way of articulating it, I was becoming aware of the spectre of evil from which no home is absolutely safe.