In the Service of Others

It was a spontaneous morning for one that had so many plans. A visit with Jane, a trip to the DMV for my driver's license renewal (yes, proof that I can still see!), and then on to IHOP for an early lunch.

There we sat, scrunched into a tiny booth in an impossibly crowded restaurant, when she came up and softly asked in heavily accented English if she could take our order. She must have known that she could be difficult to understand because she never once broke our gaze - using her eyes to ask as much as her voice.

We told her what we wanted, customizing our order just as if we were eating at a more expensive restaurant and she captured what we wanted, perfectly. Shortly we were happily chatting and dining on eggs, scrapple, and...of course...pancakes.

We asked for the bill and it came, promptly. The $30 tab reflected my customization (I'm an ala carte girl) and was the cheapest meal we've eaten in recent memory. Chris wandered off to pay the bill and I reached into my wallet to grab cash for the tip.

I thought about about the percentage for the tip and grabbed $6. Then I thought about the service and grabbed a bit more cash. I remembered her eyes and the softness of her voice and reached back in. Even as I dropped the cash onto her table I thought about how many times I've paid a straight 20% tip on a meal four to five times more expensive ...and, unfortunately...not as good. How is it that her service was worth less?

My first hour this morning was spent in getting ready for the day. My second hour included telling my daughter and my lover that I love them. My third hour reminded me to love myself. My fourth hour was in the DMV where I smiled gratefully at the woman behind the counter and observed outloud to her that it seemed many people come to her for help. She smiled throughout our 10 minute encounter, fixed a problem that had vexed me for years (I have two middle names, the result of refusing to give up the name I'd been born with and Virginia's decision nearly 2 decades ago to hyphenate the second one with my last one), and I was grateful for the good work she was doing.

I arrived the office with a smile, feeling connected to the world around me, greeted by coworkers who have become dear to me and as I unlocked my office door the bright sun caused me to squint as I sat down to my desk to perform my own service to others.

And now, 14 hours after the start of my day I feel as if it was a day well spent - connected to the universe in the spirit of service and grateful for the blessings in my life - including those who served me with a smile today.

NL

Amazing Strength in Unimaginable Grief

It has been nearly two decades now since I first visited my friends Katherine and Tom in their home. I'd brought an ornament for the tree as instructed (one I'd hand painted) and arrived timely for their annual Solstice party, an event so extraordinary that this year 60 people made it through 15 inches of snow. But they live in Martha's Vineyard now and I am still whiling away my time in DC. So I have not been in more than a decade despite being faithfully invited every year.

The first time I visited I was treated to a tour of their home. Both are avid cooks and even now, when I am in distress and say "I've taken to my kitchen" I can picture both of them at their huge stove in a kitchen perfectly outfitted with tools meant to last. As they work away, 30 year partners finely tuned to the ways of each other, they are simply delighting in the experience of doing something together. Tasting, smelling, feeling.

My favorite part of the home tour was a visit to their bathroom. They'd found it too small so they knocked out the wall to the room next door and made it bigger. In their remodelled bath was a large clawfoot tub and next to it a rocking chair so that Tom could read to Katherine while she bathed.

It is to me still the epitome of romance. But more than romance, there is a timelessness in the kind of love that has a man reading to a woman while she soaks in a tub. To simply be there with her in a moment that is about her.

They'd been together for many years before they actually married. Sitting in the cafeteria over lunch one day I asked her why they finally "tied the knot" and her answer was simply "insurance reasons." Over the years some of the rest of the story unfolded and it turns out the insurance issue was the broader one of "what is family?" Apparently Tom had ended up in the hospital - a fall I think - and Katherine had found herself unceramoniously removed from his hospital room by Tom's daughters, who were still unwilling to accept their father's relationship with her. I have no doubt that whatever reservations they had about marriage were resolved when faced with very real issue of people outside of their relationship defining the morality of the couple.

As I write this the smell of a beef dish with fennel and onion wafts from my kitchen. It is joined by the overtones of baking rosemary bread. I'd put it all on to cook and because cooking always makes me think of Katherine and Tom, I remembered I'd not yet read their most recent update.

Mid-stream in Tom's blog - ruminations - he writes: "Clearly, my death has been postphoned by four months but my life has not been extended by one minute while it has produced four months of misery for my caretakers."

At that line I am crying, as I have many times after first learning of Tom's cancer diagnosis, treatment, remission, and the re-emergence. I am praying hard again for Katherine, a woman who considered herself "just a librarian", who introduced the CIA to the internet, who wrote wonderfully whimsical guinea pig poetry - and who had a herd of guinea pigs underfoot while she cooked in her home in Bethesda (today she has an entire porch dedicated to finches!) She has always had long white hair pulled back in a braid hanging down her back and I cannot imagine her any other way. I cannot imagine her without the whimsy, the earthiness, the Texas steel that seems to seep through every pore of her body. I cannot imagine her without Tom.

I don't know how Tom and Katherine came to be together. I know there is an age difference somewhat similar to mine and Chris's and I know that apparently his family did not approve of her. I don't know where the mother of his children was in all of this and nor do I care. For it is Katherine who extends his soul and that I know with certainty that who ever came before and for however long, Katherine was the one intended for him. The mate to his soul.

Now they fight fiercely a disease that fully intends to separate the two of them and I anticipate the collapse of her heart when it finally wins. She is one of the strongest people I know but I cannot imagine how even that strength will bear her up under the grief that will surely fall upon her. He does not leave her willingly. I don't know if he realizes that every breath he takes - whether in sickness or in health - is a breath she treasures with every fiber of her being.

It is not a love I would have understood when I first met them. I recognized it but understood it to be so rare that I could never expect to be so lucky. I now understand. And I understand that it isn't a love that has to be approved of to exist. It simply is.


NL