The pleasures of the less than rich are visible only to those in that number. This is not because these pleasures are illusory but because there is a certain capacity that the poor develop that the wealthy had no need to.

Instead of the health spa, I can walk. Instead of restaurants, I cook well. I don’t buy expensive processed food, and the unexpected by-product has been the extinction of a taste for it, and the evolution of a love of fresh fruit. I remember hitchhiking through Ireland 35 years ago with nothing but an apple for the day. How I nursed it, fondled it, anticipated it, and, when the time came, savored it.

When my son was in prison, he wrote me a letter relating this incident: They were all playing volley ball in the exercise yard. Suddenly a hawk was spotted gliding overhead. Everyone stopped in his tracks and just looked at that hawk. Finally someone broke the silence and said what everyone was thinking: “I wish I was that hawk.”

Beauty is free. And it is visible in the smallest nooks and crannies. Here is the secret I learned: The less you have, the more tuned in you become to everything beautiful around you — that hawk overhead, the peculiar slant of sun during your morning and evening walk, a lovely song wafting in from somebody’s radio.

I find I don’t have to hold the mortgage on a sumptuous estate to pass by and enjoy it. These all belong to my Father anyway, and to his children who are seen “as having nothing, yet possessing everything” (2 Corinthians 6:10).

I gave my son the lowdown on Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre on the drive to the theater.

In spite of the ponderous Greek name it’s called a “comedy,” not a “tragedy.” Of course “comedy,” for the Bard, is not Lucille Ball stuffing chocolates into her maw on a runaway assembly line; it just means the stage isn’t covered with dead bodies at the end of Act V. My son was disappointed when I told him. He wanted to see the bodies.

Okay, this is interesting, I thought. Which do you think is more realistic as an ending to all stories — comedy or tragedy? “Tragedy,” came back the 18-year-old, without hesitation. (The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.) There were a still a few minutes to kill before curtain time, so I probed.

I mustered all I know about Shakespeare and all I know about life. The English playwright’s final scenes seem to break between weddings and murder-suicides. Much Ado About Nothing: double-wedding. A Midsummer Night’s Dream: triple wedding. Twelfth Night: lovers pairing. King Lear: Edmund, Gloucester, Cordelia, Lear, all dead. Macbeth: Lady and King Macbeth, dead. Othello: murder-suicide. Julius Caesar: Caesar, Cassius, Brutus, dead. Antony and Cleopatra: two suicides. Romeo and Juliet: two suicides, lots of road kill. Hamlet: just about all dead except the prince of Norway.

But, you know, whether you vote “comedy” or “tragedy” as more in line with ultimate reality depends on how long a view you take. No one gets out of this place alive, it’s true. But if you peek to the end of the novel, I notice it’s a wedding feast (Revelation).

I caught myself today before the day began in earnest. I woke up prepared to live as usual, in that old cobweb that sees all time as neutral time.I was going to shuffle over to the kitchen and thrum idly through a dated magazine and glance up at the calendar with a yawn to see if there was anything penciled in there that I had to do. I was going to make it from breakfast to lunch somehow, and then from lunch to dinner. I was going to nurse low expectations.Then I saw what I was doing and shook a little green dust off myself and said that God is on the move, and that today is a different day from yesterday. I decided to live deliberately:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,…and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,…to rout all that was not life,…to reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it….; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. (Walden, Henry David Thoreau)

March 11,2008, will never come again in all of history.

At the doctor’s office last night my physician saw something she didn’t like and ordered a few tests at the hospital today. It’s probably nothing, but the matter has prompted a scenario in my head.

What if you knew you had only one year to live? How would it make a difference in your relationship with your mate? If you knew for a fact that you were checking out in February 2009, if you were conscious every waking minute of the ticking off of days, would you be more patient with one another’s flaws? More quick to forgive? Would you see offenses downsized? Would you work harder at fanning the flames of romantic ardor? Would your priorities shift as to the best use of remaining daylight?

Remember the time your sister came for a visit from out of state, and you spent three perfectly awful, contentious weeks together? Remember how in the last two days before her departure, you both managed to summon up kindness, acutely aware of the shortness of time. Hey, if you can do it for two days, come to think of it, why couldn’t you stretch it out for two years? And if two years, why not twenty-two?

“Teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom?” (Psalm 90:12).