If, all those years ago, someone
had told you, an almost-innocent
abroad, that one day you would
return to Lucerne and spend these
precious hours in the easy company
of your own teenage son, would such
a scene have seemed remotely possible,
and what might you have thought
of the person whom you would become?
“It's just as well that we don't know
what the future holds,” people say,
by which they mostly mean that we
might simply not go on if we could
see what loss and anguish lay ahead.
And that may well be true. But maybe it
is also true that if we could foresee how
choice and change and circumstance would
lead you to walk these streets again, the sun
shimmering the lake, the impossible Alps
upreaching the sky, then perhaps, when you
looked at the beautiful young man strolling
beside you, life of your life, you would not
feel quite the same surge of overwhelming love.
This glorious disbelief. This gratitude. This joy.