In between (updated)

Ahhh. Company's gone. Dishes cleared. Food put away. And a few hours left to my "week off" to enjoy NCAA and golf on TV, while browsing the paper and finishing my osprey book. :) Nice.

We had this nice older couple from church over for dinner. (and I know what you're thinking, you snots.. "older than what? dirt? must be, to be older than you." hahahaha, very funny.)

They had no family around this weekend, either, so it was good to just eat and yak for a while, swapped all the usual getting-to-know you stories. You know the kind. You've told them so many times, you have them down to a polished tale complete with punch lines guaranteed to get a laugh, or an "oh, my!" or something. :)

But eating with these two made me, at least, feel again like I'm at an awkward age. ;) I'm in between stages.

And maybe I should consider that normal. Maybe we're always in between stages. David Gassner makes that point on the last page of his book Soaring With Fidel when he tried to figure out whether the true home of the ospreys he was tracking was their summer nesting grounds (where they worked) or their winter resting grounds (where they played.) He says:

"In the end it was a human game trying to decide and define what true home was, and the ospreys didn't care one way or another for these distinctions. But ... it occurred to me that perhaps their true home was in flight. Perhaps their home, like all our homes, was a place in between."

Yeah, maybe. Have you seen that credit card commercial where different people talk about where they are in life as being in between this and that? Like the new dad with the three-year-old in his lap and a toy to build who says he's "in between 'where's the instruction manual' and 'they grow up so fast' ", and the young professional who says that he's "right there in between an 8% mortgage and a 3% raise."

I can relate. I think I'm in between "wanting to make a lasting difference before I'm done" and "having all these lingering responsibilities from earlier years that I'm *still* not finished with."

Is it too late to join the Peace Corps?

Can I go someplace where there's no bugs?