Finding things.

I had just had breakfast with a girlfriend who insists that she will die alone surrounded with cats. I had tried to tell her that she was wrong, that she was a beautiful woman who just needed to accept the fact that her life ran in a timeline she did not yet recognize and that she would find her someone one day, but not soon, maybe.

I headed to the mall afterward to use what I thought was a “safe” bathroom (gruesome mistake, by the by), and noticed an unusual couple while wandering in a stupor recovering from the restroom break:

He was maybe 5’ tall, wearing a putty-colored cardigan and seeing the world through exceptionally thick glasses that made his eyes seem huge. She was shorter than he, a stooped little thing who moved uncertainly forward in her red sweater and white canvas sneakers as he and she wended their way through the mall chatting with lots of pauses and grins.

Watching this couple caused me to stay at the mall for almost an hour walking at a respectful distance behind – pausing when they paused, sitting when they sat, walking when they walked. I could not help but wish that this had happened before breakfast and not after so my girlfriend could have been with me to see these two people who were perfectly contented in their later years on what had all the appearances of a second date in spite of the fact that one of them had a hump and they both had mustaches. Happiness is not trendy and love does not have easily recognizable traits. They rarely look like one expects them to, and they seldom makes sense to someone not sharing in it at that exact moment. No matter who one is or what one does to attract or avoid – they have a way of finding one, in the end and if allowed.
SPM

We have had an odd summer of cool nights followed by weeks of scorching weather and now it seems that a near-permenant twighlight has settled on the district as we wait to see when the leaves will turn and fall, when the first snows will come and what plans the city has for the apartment building next door to us...

Miss Mary's Birthday

This is the first year of many, many past when Miss Mary is not at home on Sheridan for her birthday and this cannot help but make me a bit sad. Her visits this year to our house - car bouncing a little too fast down the street and stopping suddenly enough in our drive to leave her dog, Muffin, wedged somewhere under the dash - have become more and more rare. Her stamina weakens as we watch and  sometimes she seems very confused.  Her lenghty unplanned visits to various hospitals for assessment leave me hoping the medical staff in her life find a way to give her a few more years at home to be her fiesty and sometimes scary self. I'm getting less done lately with my fingers crossed, but I think it is a worthy effort...