Flowers in her hair
This morning started out funky – I was stiff from having spent the night on a friend’s couch and was freezing cold since the fog had rolled in and had just not rolled back out. I walked over to sign in at the conference and stopped at Cafe de la Presse for a decaf latte in a bowl, which was nice and hot and felt so good in my ice cold hands. Really folks, it’s August and i was wearing gloves. No lie. Thank god I found them in my coat pockets when I was but a block down the street and freezing to death.
The chatter in my head was rising to a grand crescendo having everything to do with the kind of talk that makes you want to curl up in a little ball and roll off a cliff. I kept trying to quiet it (them) but they were unrelenting.
Then I saw an email come across my Blackberry, a client I’ve worked with for many years had wrote the nicest recommendation for me on Linked In – out of the blue – and I was taken aback by his words. Then I met a friend and colleague for lunch and felt bathed in the light of being with someone who feels like family.
Later, i was passing a church in the car with another friend and the marquis read, “The Structure of Truth and Love” and I had a confluence of events, past and present, traipse across my mind’s eye, as I was with a friend getting a divorce, had just been speaking about another friend in the throes of a divorce, and had just learned my friend’s sister had divorced, and then ran into an old San Francisco friend who had just divorced. All of these were relationships that I would have bet on not just a few years ago. I thought about some of the marriages I would have have bet against and they remain intact – very odd.
As I walked down Union Street with my friend and sought out a place to stop and have a cocktail to talk, I stumbled upon buckets of dahlias that were so perfect, they looked fake, or impossibly real, and I realized right then and there their perfection was based on their fragility. And a marriage might be perfect but that doesn’t mean it will last.
