Already and Not Yet

Beneath [my] face I am a family plot. All the people I have ever been are buried there—the bouncing boy, his mother's pride; the pimply boy and secret sensualist; the reluctant infantryman; the beholder at dawn through hospital plate-glass of his first-born child...And buried in me too are all the people I have not been yet but might be someday—the Boston Strangler and St. John of the Cross, Heliogabulus and Dagwood Bumstead, Judas Iscariot and Robin Hood and Little Nell, all the lives I have not yet lived like promises not yet kept, dreams waiting for or dreading the possibility of being dreamed.

-Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace, 14-15.

Wrinkles

His great-grandmother was sitting by a huge open fireplace where logs and peat were burning. The room smelled of woods and wood-smoke. He forgot about her being frighteningly old. She had short silver curls and her face had so many wrinkles it looked as if someone had been trying to draw her for a very long time and every line put in had made the face more like her.

-L. M. Boston, The Children of Green Knowe, 11.

Accustomed to My Face

I have grown accustomed to my face and so have my family and friends. If it does not have in it the power of certain rare faces to rejoice the hearts of all who behold it, under the right circumstances it can moderately rejoice two or three selected faces. It also, as far as I know, causes no one anywhere to be afraid or to despair. I see things in my face that I wish were not there. I see things in my face that I am content to see there. There are times when I see it almost as a stranger's face. But all in all, it is a face that has served me well enough over the years and that I can live with.

-Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace, 26.