Old friends

Tears come to me in moments that surprise me: seeing a father walking his kid to school, hearing a blind man sing an old kundiman, and, this afternoon after work, reading Justice Antonin Scalia's eulogy for his friend, Martin Feinstein, then first executive director of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Justice Scalia said:

"It is with the greatest curse of advancing years that our world contracts, as friends who cannot be replaced, with insights into life that are not elsewhere available to us, leave us behind."

His speeches, compiled in the book, Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well-lived, reveal the brilliant mind of a kind person who loved his country, family, faith, and friends. I finished this collection today, after a grueling day at the clinics, with so many patients hoping for another day to dawn. Perhaps this is why I don't mind these packed train rides: I get lost in my thoughts and prayers and books, and in those precious minutes of wrestling with my thoughts and conversing with God and making sense of words in my Kindle, I find rest.

Something dawned on me, too, as I read of Justice Scalia's account of William Howard Taft, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln—excellent leaders who propelled the United States into what she is now (but, as Justice Scalia pointed out, they were not just leaders but above all good men). It is that we lack leaders to whom we can look up to, leaders who inspire and not just command. I don't think we fall short of these kinds of men and women in this country; perhaps they're not just part of this government.