I was bent over looking at a screw in the passenger side front tire when I overheard a man and a woman talking.
“Do you still love me?”
I don’t know if she intentionally made him wait or if she was struggling with how to respond.
“You know I still do. You still have my heart.”
The screw was 3/4th of the way into the tire and for a moment I wondered if I ought to get screwdriver out of my trunk and screw it the rest of the way in.
“At least one of us will get screwed today.” I laughed to myself and figured they wouldn’t appreciate it, especially since neither knew I was there.
“If I have your heart, can I have you?”
She told him she didn’t want to discuss it any further in public because people could hear them and I almost popped to say “not could, can and I have” but I remained silent.
I stood up as they walked away and asked her “are you waiting for Godot” knowing that unless she was a mind reader there was no way she would hear my question.
That was ok, I didn’t have to have an answer or need it from her. The beauty of an active imagination is I can come up with a story about who they are and why they are as they are.
Heck, I can even devise what they might yet be to each other. Cue someone waiting for a telephone call or some other message.
Letters I Have Written, Never Meaning To Send
Been digging through the archives elsewhere trying to correct broken links and various coding issues.
Makes me crazy to see so many issues, but the amount of content I have produced during 18 years of this isn’t insignificant.
Some of it absolutely includes letters I have written never meaning to send and letters I wrote with intention hoping they would be read.
Sometimes I think about what metrics I ought to use to measure success. Is it pleasure from writing and or engagement?
Am I more pleased with the posts I was paid for or with the stories I produced in which I harnessed the magic and majesty of a moment in time.
I am not sure, it depends. I always like it when my muse appreciates my work. Those comments used to come frequently but now…not so much.
In some ways it doesn’t matter because I’ll write anyway but every now and then you like knowing you were heard and or seen.
****
Come Wednesday I plan on being at the Chanukah celebration in Southlake. It will be the first such event I have attended in person since before the pandemic began.
Makes me wonder if a bit if I’ll be seen and heard or if I’ll choose to adopt my ninja persona and blend in with the crowd.
Reminds me of the mystery couple and that moment in which I almost called out to him and to her, separate and collective thoughts to be shared with both.
Life requires a little bit of love and a little bit of luck now doesn’t it.
Who Are You?
My son looked at a baby picture of me and my parents and said he recognized his grandmother but no one else.
“I know that is you, but that doesn’t look like grandpa at all. He looked at the picture of me from above and said he knew it was me, but it still didn’t look like me.”
I told him I understood because 34 years later it is hard sometimes for me to recognize myself.
That picture was taken at a dear friend’s house the night of a surprise party he and some others put on for me.
Or maybe I should clarify, the house belonged to the mother of my friend. She recently sold it and I found myself feeling a pang of loss.
Might not have been my house, but between the end of summer of ’85 into the mid 90s we had eight million parties, sleepovers, dinners and breakfasts there. It was almost an unofficial clubhouse.
Everything changes and that is ok and if you can’t accept that you have to learn how to. Some of those changes are lead to disappointment and frustration but others lead to triumph.
If I could go back in time and talk to that 18 year-old I would fill him in on a bunch of the things he/I/we have learned.
Can’t say he would take it to heart and follow that advice, but if I could get him to follow just a piece of it there would be huge dividends.
He thought there would be time to do most of what he wanted and that he would figure it out as he went.
Some of that was true.
