Small miracles

Years ago I spent a week in Port Townsend taking a photography class. My husband was working, my daughters were off at camp, and it seemed like an appropriate thing to do.

I was encouraged to go by the then manager of the photo development shop in Anacortes. He had been developing my images for a year or two at that point, and thought I had a lot of potential, so he set it up, took my money and sent it in, and drove me down for the week. I had a wonderful roommate, a terrific woman from Vancouver BC whose name I no longer remember, and the three of us spent a terrific week, getting up at 4 in the morning to photograph lighthouses and gardens; going to those fabulous bunkers they have at Fort Worden, photographing boats, and enjoying wonderful meals at the local cafes.

Now that I live closer to Port Townsend, I try to get over there every few months or so to recapture some of the joy I found in that long-ago week -- it's still one of the prettiest towns in the state of Washington, and I love to poke around the back roads and see what new surprises await my camera.

This statue stands at the end of a side road in the middle of town, and I have fond memories of a late-night exercise where we put our cameras on tripods, set the exposures to be really long, and sort of danced around the fountain with flashlights. What I also remember about the pictures that came out of that exercise is that the part of the fountain most successfully highlighted by all those flashlights was this HUGE white glob of bird poop sitting on the statue's left breast. And since, in those days, we didn't have PhotoShop, we couldn't remove it from the images, and none of them were really saleable.

Somehow humans seem to have been designed to spot flaws rather than to enjoy the other 95% of things that's pretty near perfect. We don't see the loveliness of the statue but rather the white spot on her boob. We lose sight of the overall health of our bodies and are consumed with agony over a sore toe. We forget how thoughtful and generous our mates are but can't forgive one thoughtless comment or mistake.

I'm sure this feature had some genetic purpose when it was engineered into us -- and the ability to find flaws has certainly proven a boon to my husband in his work. But at some point I believe we each have a choice: we can hang on, cling to our sense of pain or sadness or injustice, or we can set it aside and rejoice in all that's right in our lives.

I'm not saying we should ignore -- or even put up with -- the bad stuff when it truly is the dominant aspect of our situation. In such cases it is important to admit that life at this point is truly flawed and do our best to cope with or rectify the problem.

But I'm thinking now of the time the women's choir sang Benjamin Britten's Ceremony of Carols from the loft of the Howe Library in Hanover, NH, and there was one woman whose voice was consistently "off." At first, listening from the desk below the loft where I served as circulation manager, I found the wrong notes incredibly irritating. But as the songs continued I came to realize that the slight (and it was actually slight) imperfection made the music breathtakingly real and human.

Sometimes I think that those occasional wrong notes in life may be just the spice we need to appreciate the incredible beauty and tenderness of life. All us humans, all struggling to make our way in the world despite the sore toes and bad haircuts and faulty paint jobs and leaky tires and dysfunctional families and learning disabilities and all the other things that make life challenging for us -- it's really very dear. And the fact that the music is still so lovely in spite of those wrong notes? Nothing short of a miracle!