I'm writing this as I sit in our very comfortable room at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Charleston, SC, where we are visiting for a few days to help my niece Annie and her longtime friend Tommy get started on their marriage. The wedding will be on Saturday, preceded by several gatherings on Thursday and Friday, and followed by dinner and dancing. (We took a refresher lesson at the Fred Astaire studio in Mystic, just to be sure we were ready to do some fox trotting and swinging on Saturday.) Many of my siblings and their spouses are coming as well, so it will be not only a wedding but a festive family reunion.

Last Sunday, we again attended the Quaker Meeting in Westerly, and again, I found it enjoyable and even inspiring. I find that I feel perfectly at home sitting on the bare benches in the big and cozy but bare meeting room for 60 minutes of total silence. I find I am able to quietly allow myself to focus just on the present moment, which I believe is what Jesus kept telling his friends to do. ("Behold,  now is the perfect time. Now is the moment of salvation.") After the meeting, we joined the other Friends for a friendly potluck Thanksgiving leftover lunch, and this was also a surprisingly comfortable experience for me.  (Who knows? I may have found my Sunday morning community -- well, for the near future, anyway.)