The Road goes ever on and on 
Down from the door where it began. 
Now far ahead the Road has gone, 
And I must follow, if I can, 
Pursuing it with eager feet, 
Until it joins some larger way 
Where many paths and errands meet. 
And whither then? I cannot say.

— Bilbo in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings

It’s on DVD now, the 8mm home movie clip of my sister Vicki and me on Christmas Day in Okinawa in 1963. We are on the porch in front of our house, the door wrapped like a gift in silver foil, a big red ribbon on it cruciform and tied up in a bow. I am wearing my new holster and my six-shooters, my leather vest and cowboy hat, and she’s decked out in her new white dress and her new Mary Janes. Her hands adorned by her new white gloves she’s slapping me about the face and I’ve got my guns in my hands applying the butt-ends of those pistols to the top of her head which is coiffed appropriately for the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Then the silver door opens. And there is our mother in her cat eye glasses, lipstick and Christmas dress. She bends over and, pointing to the camera, says something to us — this was 8 millimeter film so there’s no audio. It’s evident she’s saying that Daddy is capturing all this on film, for we look both of us in the direction of the camera and quick as Jesse James I put my pistols in their holsters the way the gunslingers do, Vicki adjusts her dress while our mother fixes her hair, and the two of us put our arms about each other just so and walk arms around each other down the sidewalk to the car, the picture of two loving, happy, camera-fearing children.

What were we fighting about? We had come to blows over my sister’s anger at my having lost the key to her brand new roller skates. So we were not fighting over nothing.

Ten years later, a door opened to the Chapel of the post where we lived, White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. It was held open by the invitation of a friend, and under the auspices of the chaplain at the time, an Episcopal priest. The girl who went through it is not the same girl who came out. Vicki started to recognize that her life was lived under a beneficent eye, and not just the eye of her father looking through a camera. She began to live Coram Deo, as the monks use to say, before the face of God.