rivka

This morning

curiousangel and I walked to church. It was cool and sunny, and the sky was a deep pure blue. Church was crowded, as it's been lately - people who arrive late have trouble finding seats, and that's not how it was when we started attending two and a half years ago. At the end of the service, the largest new members' class in ten years signed the book - so many people that we ran out of "signing the book" hymns and had to sing the last one three times. (We're going to sit at the welcome table, we're going to sit at the welcome table one of these days, hallelujah...) We spent half an hour at coffee hour, chatted with some newcomers, hugged our friends, made dinner plans for next weekend, did a little church business. (

curiousangel with the board, me with one of my covenant groups.)

Afterward we bought a Sunday paper from the guy who sells us one every week, and exchanged a few words with him about the weather. We walked around the corner for a dim sum lunch at the Chinese restaurant that knows us by name. Shrimp and scallop dumplings, fried shrimp balls, sticky rice and meats steamed in a lotus leaf, spare ribs with black bean sauce, sweet lotus seed buns, two pots of jasmine tea, $11.55.

Then

curiousangel went back to church for a presentation on socially responsible investing, and I went to the main branch of the Baltimore Public Library. I picked up tax forms and then spent an hour browsing the stacks. I ran into someone I work with in the checkout line, and we chatted about the Orioles' lineup and the big theater that just opened up downtown. I noticed again that this library is always full of people - not just in the fiction library and the children's room, or at the computers in the lobby, but even in the back corners of the Humanities section on the third floor. The library feels like an active center of the community, in the most natural possible way - not in the trying-too-hard way of an institution straining to be relevant.

Walking home in the sun, I felt intense satisfaction. This is the kind of life I want to have. I'm happy with my life right now - not because it fell into my lap in pre-formed perfection, but because I've figured out how I want to live, and made conscious choices about how to make that happen.