Last Friday An Ending. Thursday Week A Beginning.

My fellow Guiding Light watcher, Barrie, gave me a ballpoint pen with this lighthouse on the clip. After the demise of the pen, the little lighthouse found a home on the corner of my computer monitor. I've pried it off and reglued it to each new one for more than ten years now.

In just a few minutes, I'm going to pry it off again and put it away for safekeeping until I decide on it's new home.

The end of TV's longest running soap opera, Guiding Light, (which I started watching as a tot at my mothers knee) came last Friday. Just so happens that the end of GL coincides with my retirement from a place I've worked for more than 25 years; and I've been coming to this campus as a student or worker for more than half my life.

I've got my basic plans about what I'll do, where I'll live, where I'll work part-time starting Oct. 1, but the rest is unchartered territory. When I find a new home for my little lighthouse, it will carry on as a reminder of the light of encouragement and hope among friends and family.

The central character in Guiding Light's original radio days was Reverend Rutledge. Here is an excerpt from his Christmas sermon which Aunt Meta recited in an episode from 2000. Seems perfect for unchartered waters.

"There is a destiny that makes us brothers.
None goes his way alone.
All that we bring into the lives of others
comes back into our own."