Life Unexpected

Trying out an iPhone post:

Yesterday morning The Quiet Husband and I and Karen West and her husband walked a quiet beach encrusted with barnacles and concealing clams that squirt upward through the sand when you step on their territory, an experience we would not have had but for friendships created across cyberspace between parents who have children who, as Karen put it, have become invisible.

In the late afternoon, we visited the gracefully contemporary chapel at Seattle University where, as happens more often than you might think, the Presbyterian pastor found herself explaining The Spiritual Exercises to some other folks. (Hey, they asked.) None of that would have been within the scope of my imagination seven or eight years ago.

This afternoon we'll celebrate Father's Day with The Lovely Daughter's friends from Bellingham, thanks to her years at Willamette University, which were a direct consequence of Hurricane Katrina.

And in a couple of days, Gregarious Son is boarding a French naval surveillance ship in the Indian Ocean to observe an anti-piracy exercise.

I'm not sure which of all these events would have been the least predictable a decade ago.