"Stay at my house if you like, bird," he said. "I am sorry I cannot hoist the sail and take you in with the small breeze that is rising. But I am with a friend."
There's a lot of tenderness is this tiny paragraph. I can sense how much Santiago cares about the world and the creatures in it. Santiago knows his place.
It has been a strange kind of day for me. I worked all morning, into the afternoon. I went home for a little while, worked some more, and took a nap. In the evening, I hosted an outdoor bluegrass concert at the library. It rained in the morning pretty heavily, but it cleared up in the afternoon. Then, right before the concert was set to start, the sky turned sheet metal gray and started spitting.
For the hour that the musicians picked and fiddled and strummed, I kept me eye on the clouds. But God must like bluegrass music, because the rain held off, and about 170-plus people clapped and whooped and danced for 60 minutes.
I stood there, thinking that I had helped bring a little joy into the world tonight. I felt connected. Like Santiago, I knew my place.
And that was Saint Marty's blessing today.
