The Long Goodbye

We don't leave for three weeks.  Three weeks is really a pretty long time.  But I'm already getting misty eyed about everything.  Weird, weird things...like buying a big bag of tilapia and thinking "this is the last big bag of tilapia I will buy in Salt Lake for a year"  You could almost hear the background music of "Sunrise, sunset" from Fiddler on the Roof as I tossed the frozen fish into the cart.  I am definitely hard wired for nostalgia.  I may have been the only kid who had a funeral service for her baby teeth.  But still I'm a little surprised at myself.  It's not like I'm leaving forever.  I reassure my kids of that at least four times a week.  We are coming back.  But I guess in the "you can not step in the same river twice" idea, we aren't coming back.  Things will change while we are gone.  We will change while we are gone.
Oddly enough, given my nostalgic bent, I'm really grateful for the sense of ending and beginning.  It is so easy to think of your life in one long stretch of stuff happening and overlapping.  Actual starts and stops are rare--but they are so helpful when you are trying to become a better person.  You really have to look at who you are now and who you want to be the next time you are in Smiths buying tilapia.