Recommended.......................

 

I wanted to tell Uncle Will I had noticed, not just his actions today but his actions through all these years, to let him know I loved him, and that I so appreciated the burden he recognized and shouldered.  That's a complicated thing to talk about.  I worried I didn't have the words.  Thankfully I wouldn't need words.

     I reached into the bag and gripped the neck of the bottle and walked out to the waiting room.  He saw me and leapt up and we embraced.  Then I handed him the bottle.  Tears filled his eyes and there wasn't a word that needed to be said.  He took that bottle home and shares it with special people and on special occasions.  I'm not sure what it means, but the last two gifts I've given Uncle Will were that bottle and a Thomas Merton book, because I like to talk about my evolving faith with him.  There's a synchronicity at work all around us.  A few weeks later, a package arrived at my house from the Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery.  I tore open the box and gasped.  Julian had sent a hand-labeled bottle of whiskey to Wallace, bearing her name and date of birth, safe in a plush red bag.  It sits in my liquor cabinet, hopefully making the trip, waiting on a time when its presence is required to properly convey what a moment means, or what the people we are sharing that moment with mean, so we can revel in the great communal joy of being alive.

-Wright Thompson,  Pappyland:  A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things that Last