Depeche Mode Was Right

I have been smiling all day today for a variety of reasons. These smiles have ranged from smiles of pure, unbridled happiness, to rueful "are you kidding me?" smiles, to head-thrown back belly laughs at some utterly comical moments. At one point today I swore that my life was what happened when God turned on the TV to watch her "stories."

Without going into detail about my day, suffice it to say that God has an exquisite sense of irony and, as Depeche Mode said, "a sick sense of humor."

And this is a lesson I should have already learned. When my family first moved to Georgia and I got my job on St. Simons Island, we lived about an hour away. I would load my son into the car each morning and make the monotonous, but not overly stressful, trip to the island to drop him off at preschool not far from my office. One day, I saw a man walking his daughter to the preschool from their house across the street. I took a look around the neighborhood. It was filled with nice, modest homes with little yards and beautiful live oak trees draped with Spanish moss. I remember sighing and saying to myself, "I wish I lived here. To be on the island, in walking distance from the school, and close to work. That would be just perfect."

After my ex-husband and I divorced, I moved to a small house on the island. It was so much closer to work and to Declan's school on the north side of the island. One evening not too long after the move, I was driving down my street and waved to Scott, a friend who lives with his wife and daughter a few houses down, and realized that Scott and Parker were the dad and daughter that I had seen when I said my little prayer a few years earlier. So here I am, exactly where I said I wanted to be. In that very same little neighborhood, in walking distance from Declan's old preschool. I certainly didn't get here in the way I imagined it when I made that "wish," but I'm here just the same. See? God does listen.

So one of the morals of the day is be careful what you wish for, because you just may get it. And then what? I'm really not sure . . . but I'm still smiling!