The Barrows and Bergs spent today with our good friends Dan Coyle and Kris Capel and daughters Anneka and Amelia, who are in town for one of their all-too-frequent visits from the far-off Twin Cities. Kris was the assistant pastor at Holy Communion for several years but they ended up moving because of Dan’s work, and for a lot of us their departure left a crater of loss which is still waiting to be fully filled.
When they visited last summer, the same crew spent a full day in Chicago, visiting Taste of Chicago and Navy Pier and returning home with bloody stumps where our feet used to be. This time we were a bit more sensible and limited ourselves to the Milwaukee Zoo, but we still had ourselves a fantastic time under sunny skies with a high of 75 degrees. Talk about a perfect day – but even if it had been 33 and snowing, it would have just been great to be together again.
For all the fun we had with lions, monkeys, elephants, peacocks, bats, goats, and a delightful red panda who stole our hearts, I find myself most smiling about something at the end of our time together which didn’t have a whole lot to do with the zoo at all. At the end of the afternoon, just as we were about to leave the zoo, the girls spotted a beautiful carousel. Amelia was actually right in the middle of crying for her pacifier, but one look at the glittering carousel was all it took for her to forget all about pacifiers and to beg for a ride. So Kris, Anneka, Amelia and Anneka Barrow climbed aboard for a ride while the rest of us delighted in their delight.
What made it just a little bit poignant was that last year during our Chicago excursion, we enjoyed a similar experience with the Navy Pier carousel. . . except that last year Amelia was a bit too young for the carousel and didn’t quite know what it was all about. But exactly one year later, Amelia was old enough to recognize a carousel when she saw it- to say the word carousel – and to gleefully ride it with her mom beside her, absolutely fearless and enjoying every minute. And all that changed in the space of a single year. And if we are together again next year around the fourth of July, yet another year of growth will have taken place and for all we know our goddaughter will be dating or driving a car by then! (She is mighty precocious!) And unlike the carousel, which stops its spinning after just a few times around, life just keeps circling with no possibility of pausing- and if anything, it racing around ever more quickly. And that’s the way it’s got to be, so one might as well enjoy the ride for as long as it lasts.
pictured: left to right: Anneka, Kris, Amelia, and Anneka Barrow on the Milwaukee Zoo’s carousel. You can see a picture of last year’s carousel ride on my Chicago ’07 page.