All You Need Is Love

It began with a toast to the New Year. It ended with a toy bottle of ketchup. This lesson I learned, that I keep re-learning, hearing, and continue to practice. How do I keep the moving forward? Leap into great adventure, abundant blessings, when arrows are flying, old tapes stream through thoughts like off-key solo performance on American Idol. Love is patient. Blonde-haired grandson watched us with those curious piercing blue eyes as we chatted in kitchen, my daughter, son-in-law and husband. We clicked our glasses in toast to New Year, "Cheers!" We said. Click, click. Blonde boy scurried out of kitchen, returning moments later holding a sippy cup, thermos style, wordlessly raised it into air, a solemn expression pasted on his almost two-year-old face. "Cheers!" Our voices rose in unison, reaching down we touched our glasses to his, again, again and again. Dishing up my dinner plate, a Beatles tune played across my mind, soft and warm like, "All you need is love, all you need is love, love, love is all you need." Moments later, after taking first bite of dinner, brown-haired boy silently toddled over, tipped toy ketchup bottle over a portion of my food and gave red plastic bottle a few quick shakes. Love is kind. How to keep moving forward? It's in front of my starving eyes at every turn, sandwiched in between toasts and plastic ketchup bottles. For every step forward, I take two backward, and memories wash over me like a sun-kissed meadow, I am transported back into the sixties. Before I knew pain and frustration, hard choices, loss of loved ones, and chronic pictures of the Kardashian's. The Beatles song crooning, music wafting from plastic double-sided 45 record, lyrics reminding me again and again and again..."All you need is love, all you need is love."