Morning Thanks--?????

This shot stays on the shelf. Down here in the basement, the walls are full of canvas photographs. In a spare room behind us, a couple dozen wait to rotate into the lineup next time I change the set. In the last 15 years, I've taken hundreds, even thousands of shots, just like everyone else with a cellphone. 

But this shot, now 17 years old, stays in a frame on the shelf, not because it's the best photograph I've ever taken, but because the moment was so profound and so unique, that like the photo itself the moment stays, front and center, in my memory.

We'd been adequately warned. People had told us we'd go stark raving mad being grandparents. Time and time again people would say it. I wasn't a Doubting Thomas exactly--I didn't pooh-pooh their obvious joy. I just smiled as they were braying and waited for the conversation to steer itself elsewhere.

Then it happened. Sure enough, they'd spoken the unvarnished truth: there are no words to describe what it felt like to see my daughter hold her own baby, my own--our own--first grandchild. That picture conjures the thrill of that moment. I'd been warned, but I was still unprepared for the flood of whatever grand emotion washed through me.

And now there's this one.

The truth is, we've already got a hundred pictures of this little dear. They flow magically into an on-line album full of precious shots I've never touched; but here the two of them are on a double-wide screen in front of me, an image of yet another firstborn, my son's. Like I said, I've got a hundred pictures already, and she's barely six months old.

But this one does me in. This one is special, not because it is clearly some talented photographer's creative genius, but because my daughter-in-law's cellphone-shot from the bathroom fills the screen with joy. He's vacuuming, he's smiling, and that darling grandbaby couldn't be happier.

Gorgeous.

If I knew exactly how to say it, I'd give thanks this morning for what last night's new picture does to my soul, filling it with an emotion that's as fully human as it is gloriously divine. It's life. And life itself is such a gift.