The concept of life’s seasons seems to keep popping up lately, including the new theme for the adult ladies’ Sunday school class that I teach. It’s an old discussion brought up in Ecclesiastes with “To everything there is a season . . . a time to be born, and a time to die.” Shakespeare put it in the form of acts in a play on the stage of life and named seven acts. Since the idea is buzzing in my head, I may (or may not) put words to my own acts in this play over the next few Fridays.
I’ll start with my infant stage, but without Shakespeare’s unpleasant description. I don’t remember much of that stage, but there is a baby book with spaces for recording important happenings for the first five years. I’m guessing the book was a baby gift. Tucked inside the book are congratulatory cards on my birth, early birthday cards, a certificate for attendance at Vacation Bible School when I was eight months old (both parents on the faculty), and scrap paper lists of gifts – no doubt intended to be written down any day now in the book.
For the first few years, care was taken to enter that I laughed at 4 weeks; got my first tooth at six months; and ate dinner at Cousin Fred Bagwell’s on my first birthday which was the day Daddy preached at Bethlehem Baptist Church. Aunt Dee, who lived about 40 miles away, gave me a birthday party for my second birthday with three friends invited – all boys. She had taken me home for a few days to give Mama some relief and time with the new baby sister. I am sure I lucked out on that one since Aunt Dee had no children but doted on her nieces and nephews and made excellent cakes. By the fifth birthday, nothing is recorded but there was a third sister by then so who had time?
The second child, my sister Beth, was not so lucky as to get her own baby book so her information is written beneath or beside mine if it shows up at all. If there were baby books for the other two sisters, I am not aware. All in all, it seems pretty typical for parents with more than one child to document the first child carefully and fall off for the others, especially for those who came as close together as the first three of us did.
As I look through the book, I only find one thing that is familiar, though it was ongoing, and I may remember it from a later time. Mama records my favorite Psalm when I am 3 ½ as number 24 and says I can repeat number 23. Early impressions are lasting and in the first seasons of life are the seeds of those to come. If you ask me my favorite psalm today, the answer will be Psalm 24. It was and is majestic and appealed to that little girl and now to this woman with many stages behind her.