Tuesday, February 13, 2024

It’s Getting Real

Yesterday I received the finished manuscript of my book from the Publisher. At this point in the process no more changes can be made. It has been edited and proofed to within an inch of its life. For better or for worse it is done. If there is a misspelled word or misplaced punctuation mark it has managed to avoid detection by what seems like a million eyes. So be it. The cover art has been chosen. The back cover teaser has been written. We have a finished product. What comes next are consultations with marketing and promotion people who will school me on the best ways to get the thing in front of the book buying public. They will instruct me in the ways of social media and digital presence. I will be given promotion flyers for local bookstores along with suggestions of how to schedule readings etc.. It is all a bit terrifying.

The story I am currently writing which had laid dormant for months has suddenly sprung back to life in my head. I have been writing every night for over a week in that little universe. Meanwhile I am in the midst of my busiest season at work, meetings on top of meetings with client after client, an avalanche of numbers with dollar signs. My brain is tired. What I need is a proper distraction. I need a road trip to see my kids. So Pam, Lucy and I will be heading down to Columbia for a visit with my first born this weekend. We had hoped to arrange a triangle tour and hit up Nashville to visit with Patrick after leaving Kaitlin’s but weren’t able to get that arranged because of schedules. But we will head down there later in March. By the time April gets here A Life of Dreams will have dropped and will hopefully be flying off the shelves. Maybe that’s a bit optimistic, more like selling briskly. Who am I kidding? I am a rookie novelist. Sales will be spotty. However the thing sells, I will have accomplished a life long goal of becoming a semi-professional writer—at age 65. 

Better late than never.

Sunday, February 11, 2024

Of Course I’m watching the Super Bowl!

Pam and I will be watching the Super Bowl this evening. Football is not my sport, especially the professional version. I will forever be a baseball guy. But I wouldn’t miss the Super Bowl. Its not just the game, its the extravaganza. First there’s the anxiety that builds leading up to the singing of the national anthem. Will they butcher the thing or create something beautiful? Then there’s the commercials, many of which are quite clever, a few of which are hilarious, and many where you shake your head and ask aloud, *WTHWT??? Of course there’s the halftime show. Often the performer is designed to appeal to Boomers, some guy who’s best years were several decades ago. Other times its some dazzling new star who most Boomers have never heard of. This year I believe its Usher, which seems a nice tweener choice.

Of course this year the ratings are predicted to be through the roof, some saying that it will be the most watched TV show in the history of  television. Why? The answer is…Taylor Swift. The wildly popular pop star is dating the second best player on the Chiefs, Travis Kelce. For reasons that escape my powers of comprehension, there are millions of people who despise this woman, even more millions who actually believe she is part of a vast conspiracy to help Joe Biden win the 2024 election…or something. There are many fans of football who have loudly complained about the fact that during the 3 plus hours it takes to broadcast an NFL game, the cameras point to Taylor Swift whenever her boyfriend makes an outstanding play on the field, for approximately 45 seconds of those 3 hours. These irate fans say that this 45 second inclusion of a pop star hopping up and down with glee in a luxury box aside Mr. Kelce’s family and friends are somehow cheapening the game…a sentence that literally made me laugh just typing it. Since I am largely agnostic on the subject of the sanctity of professional football, I have no opinion on this issue. I do wonder why Miss Swift is hated so vociferously by so many people. I wouldn’t consider myself a fan. I can only name two or three of her songs. But what little I know of her are mostly admirable things. First of all she writes her own music, no small feat. Second, she is a savvy businesswoman who has been quiet adept at sticking it to one of the most self-dealing industries in America—the music business. Third, you are free to like or dislike her music, but she is an honest to God musician, not the product of computer generated algorithms masquerading as music. She plays the guitar and piano and writes songs. What a concept.




As far as the actual game goes, this one might be good. One team is led by the best player in the game, quarterback Patrick Mahomes. The other team’s quarterback still lives at home with his parents and his entire salary amounts to pocket change on Mahomes’ balance sheet…yet his team comes into the game as a slight favorite. Although this David v Goliath thing makes for a nice story I don’t buy it for a minute. I expect Patrick Mahomes and his team to dominate.

The real reason Pam and I will be watching tonight is because it gives us an excuse to eat delicious and unhealthy food. Pam will make some amazing snacks which I will post pictures of later. She will also provide Super Bowl Bingo cards for us to fill in—many with Taylor Swift themed items—which should be great fun.

While we’re watching we will both be keeping a sharp eye out for any possible examples of Taylor Swift Psy-ops.



* what the hell was that???

Wednesday, February 7, 2024

Pain of the Month Club

When I was a much younger man old people really got on my nerves. For purposes of this discussion I will define “old” as people at least 60 years old. My sister Paula and I used to roll our eyes at each other every time Mom and Dad invited some of their friends over for dinner. We knew what was coming. For old people dinner time conversation invariably degraded into an episode of General Hospital. It would go something like this:

Mom: I talked with Erma yesterday and the poor woman is struggling with the colitis again.

Geezer #1: That poor thing. And its not like George can take care of her what with his sugar diabetes.

Geezer #2: You know I told George to go see a specialist back when he got that hernia in his groin but he tried to tough it out and now look at him.

Dad: Well at least neither of us picked up that Whooping cough when it was going around back in the Spring.

Mom: Maybe not, but I declare honestly, I would rather have the whooping cough than have to put up with sugar diabetes.

Needless to say, this sort of dinner time conversation didn’t exactly aid in digestion. But it seemed that every single time my parents got together with their friends all they talked about was their interminable list of ailments. Fast forward roughly 50 years to the sorry state that I now find myself in.

It is a humbling experience when you recognize your parent’s behavior in yourself, especially when you become guilty of the very same things they did that bugged the daylights out of you. Unfortunately, I have discovered the reason behind their often tortured dinner time accounts. Here’s the deal…since I have been in my 60’s literally every month of my life brings some new physical irritant onto the scene. I will wake up one morning and out of the blue one of my feet feels like I spent the entire night walking across a football field full of Legos. Then, as mysteriously as it appeared it will vanish just about the time I’ve decided it might be time to go see a doctor. Then, the next month it will be an unexplained throbbing pain in my left thumb…I’m not making this up. For weeks I will go back and forth on whether or not I should go get it looked at and then BAMM…its gone, replaced by a burning sensation in my left hip which turns up out of thin air. It occurs to me that if I went to the doctor each time my body sprouts a new pain I might as well see if they will set up a cot for me in the back room.

So I was thinking that I need to do something proactively to spare my own children from having to endure the same kinds of dinner conversations I grew up with. Suppose I could start a chat room of some kind strictly for those of us over the age of 60 where we could all gather to discuss all of our most recent physical humiliations amongst ourselves—sort of like a safe space for seniors to discuss our health woes. I was thinking of calling it the Pain of the Month Club. As soon as you wake up with hair suddenly growing out of your—I don’t know—-eyeballs, you could just log in and get the conversation rolling with:

Me: Hey guys! Didn’t somebody here have hair that started growing out of their earlobes so bad they had to start braiding it? Well, top this—-this past week hair started growing out of my left eyeball!!

Then 30 minutes later when you discover that you aren’t alone, that in fact people have noticed hair growing out of every single orifice of the body since they started on Social Security, you’ve gotten it all out of your system and the horrifying subject need never be spoken of again around the children.

I’m determined people. I am not going to be like my parents at the dinner table!!!

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

Bio Pic Search

In preparation for the publication of my novel, I am creating an author website on the advice of my publisher. This will be a site where people can come to learn about me, the book, my blog, and also an ideal place to purchase said book. Actually, “I” am doing no such thing. Pam will be the creator of this website because when it comes to this sort of thing she is amazingly talented, as everyone in our neighborhood knows every time they receive the Wythe Trace Newsletter. 

So yesterday she sends me a text telling me that she will be scouring through our 10,000 plus digital photograph library to find an appropriate one to serve as the Bio picture for this website. This would save us the hassle and expense of having to pay a professional for headshots. After a while she sends me this one with the simple caption: Bio Picture??


Ahh yes…who could forget last summer’s Nudity Day on Quantabacook? 

But, two can play this game, I thought. So, I countered with this beauty from that time I had an allergic reaction to something which caused both of my eyes to swell…


Not to be deterred she sent me this classic…


Ultimately she decided on a more conventional shot which she sent me along with this observation: “That right there is a guy that makes my heart skip a beat.”


…To which I replied, “Great! All we need in this family is someone else with an irregular heartbeat!”

To any kids out there who might stumble across this post, here’s my advice—marry someone who makes you laugh.








Saturday, February 3, 2024

My First Story Time Gig

As many of you know I became a volunteer at my church’s Cafe as soon as it opened eight months ago. I help open the place up on Friday mornings from 7:00 to 10:00. My boss is the indomitable Jennifer Glotz who comes equipped with a personality which is the equivalent of three cups of espresso. She is a dynamo of action and ideas and her leadership makes the volunteer experience an awful lot more fun that it probably should be! Recently, she came up with the idea of Friday morning Story Time, whereby we invite stay at home Mom’s or Dad’s along with babysitting grandparents to bring their kids to the Cafe at 10:00 while one of our volunteers reads to them. The idea was that during the bleak mid-winter, here was an opportunity to get out of the house and have some interaction with other humans and maybe a cup of coffee in the bargain. Yesterday was just the second such Story Time, and featured a new, throughly untested and risky reader.

Me.

I had stuck around the previous week to see how the first Story Time was going to go down. Last Friday there were two really young kids along with three older, elementary aged kids.The little ones sat in the reader’s lap while the big kids sat in their own chairs reading their own books trying to look disinterested. They were clearly too cool for this particular scene! I figured that this gig would be a breeze.

But yesterday there was a totally different crowd and vibe. There must have been ten kids in all, along with a wide assortment of parents and grandparents. Most of the kids were toddlers with varying attention spans that ranged from two minutes to two seconds. Some of them sat with their parents and hung on every word that came out of my mouth—which was a bit intimidating. I kept thinking, “No, no kids. I am an unreliable teacher! Don’t trust anything I say to you!!” Others would listen for a minute then wander off, then suddenly reappear out of nowhere at your side just to check in on the story. But talk about some adorable pups, Holy Cow. As I read from Dr. Seuss about the trip to the Pet Store their little eyes were wide with fascination. When I started reading about the Mom with six arms they seemed hesitant, but by the time the Mom had 16 arms they were in on the joke and relieved that the strange and much too loud man wasn’t a lunatic after all.


I think that the kids had a good time. The parents and grandparents seemed to enjoy themselves too.

I…had a blast.


Thursday, February 1, 2024

Poor Elmo…

Sometimes I see something in the news that stops me dead in my tracks. Such was the case last night when I saw a story that involved the Sesame Street puppet named Elmo. 


Yep. This guy. Apparently he has his own social media account and occasionally sends out thoughts to his hundreds of thousands of followers which was the case yesterday when he offered up this:


The response, at least from the sort of people who follow Sesame Street characters on Twitter, was overwhelming. This innocent enough post at last check has been viewed a staggering 140 million times. Elmo would be forgiven if his follow-up post was something like “Sorry I asked!” What followed Elmo’s question was a torrent of angst unleashed by the American public which I will summarize thusly…

“Since you asked Elmo, I am anxious, fearful, tired, depressed and broke. Also, I am dogged by an overwhelming sense of existential dread and despair.”

The negative responses that have poured in to Elmo were quickly noted by the Mental Health community as evidence that more spending is required on mental health services. Even President Biden felt compelled to put his two cents worth in. Soon every grievance group in the United States piped in to point out that mental health issues “hit women and minorities hardest”, just in case white men were thinking of stealing the spotlight. Finally, Elmo himself chimed in with this:


By the time Elmo came along, my kids had moved on from Sesame Street so he and I have no history to speak of. I do remember the Tickle Me Elmo craze, but other than that, I got nothing. But, as cartoonish characters go he seems nice enough. And, I suppose it was nice of him to ask how we are doing. But the onslaught of negative responses to his question are puzzling to me. What would motivate anyone to answer him with an airing of every negative thought that ever entered the human heart? Our ancestors and their ancestors before them lived lives of quiet desperation where the issues weren’t “I’m anxious, depressed and broke” so much as it was, “I’m exhausted, hungry and cold.” But even so, they weren’t the kind of people who would offer up their tales of woe to total strangers or even their closest friends if given the smallest opening. All Elmo had to do was post a five word question on the internet and suddenly 140 million people were on the couch!

Yes, I understand that we are living in confusing times. Yes, I know that life is hard and there are times when its easy to feel overwhelmed. Yes, mental health is as important as physical health. But, while life in 2024 has its challenges, this isn’t the Black Plague, people. This isn’t the Blitz in London. We aren’t literally starving and freezing while standing in soup lines during the Great Depression. Most of the people who answered Elmo did so using devices containing the combined wisdom of the world delivered to the palms of their hands. On those devices are thousands of mental health apps offering help with every emotional crisis known to exist in the human experience. Never in the history of civilization have average people had such easy access to every slice of human knowledge. Never in the history of civilization has a smaller percentage of the human population lived in poverty, without food and shelter, running water and access to health care. But don’t tell that to Elmo. He would be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that his fellow Americans must be living through the darkest moment in the entire universe.

Oh and…love you too, Elmo.









Monday, January 29, 2024

Room for Rent

It was a classic farmhouse, white with black shutters. A wide porch which ran across the front sheltered a double door and three windows on each side of the entrance. For years Eleanor would attach seasonal flags to the pole out front, ones she had made out of old scraps from worn out sails. Now there were no flags, just the rusted metal base that wept brown tears down the white column by the front steps. The shrubs around the porch had grown wild, long entangled branches reaching this way and that. The big house was over 150 years old and was finally showing its age, just three years of neglect having taken a toll on the place. But nobody in town blamed Elly. It wasn’t her fault that her husband had been taken from her so tragically. Nobody could have been expected to keep everything together after finding their husband dead on the kitchen floor from a massive heart attack the morning following his 60th birthday. Three years had passed since the morning that changed everything and now Elly had turned 60. Instead of a barbecue with fifty people, she had spent the night alone in the big house watching reruns of Foyle’s War, letting her cellphone go to voicemail.





She had become the talk of the town. Her withdrawal from public life, while at first understandable, had now become cause for great concern in town. One by one her friends had been shut out from her life and now seemingly everyone had an opinion as to the mental state of their beloved former friend. Some claimed that her and Will had one of those rare, magical connections from which it was impossible to recover once it is lost so abruptly. Others, less romantically inclined, worried that by walling herself inside that old house for so long, she was simply losing her mind from lack of human interaction. Still others fretted over the condition of her soul, having been shocked by her disappearance from church at precisely the time when the place and its people could have done her immeasurable good. But mostly, the good and decent people of Claremont missed Elly. She had been the unofficial mayor of the town for as long as anyone could remember. To lose someone so dear, so essential to the harmony of their associations, had cast a cloud over all of them.


A handful of her closest friends still paid her visits. They would bring flowers for her kitchen table and donuts from Vale’s. Elly would greet them unenthusiastically and try not to be rude, listening to the latest news and gossip. But each time she heard car tires in the driveway an internal clock would begin ticking. Twenty minutes was about as long as she could manage. As she awkwardly began inviting everyone to follow her outside to the driveway, she would thank them all for coming, hug them in the most perfunctory way possible, then wave at them as they disappeared in the pines by the road. Almost every visit found Elly in her pajamas, hair up in a bun, looking skinnier than ever. The friends would talk about nothing else for days…Elly looks like a ghost.


What Elly couldn't bear to say was that the mere sight of them made her sick to her stomach. Each of her friends brought to mind memories of Will, glimpses of his ghost smiling and laughing with them at some forgotten dinner. She simply couldn’t take on a single additional memory. Her heart was full enough. She felt as if she was drowning in faded visions of him, maybe just one more would finish her off. As each month passed she began to draw a strange and dangerous comfort from her loneliness. She knew it wasn’t good for her, she could feel herself slipping away from the world, but the thought of driving into town to have breakfast at Tilly’s felt like a fate far worse than loneliness. Walking through those doors would be to invite a thousand fresh visions of him to rain down on her, something close to suicide.


So she convinced herself that the old house was the safest place to be, the lesser evil of a series of imperfect choices that fate had foisted upon her. She had Netflix. She read book after book on her Kindle. She still found a measure of comfort from tending the garden. But Elly wasn’t accomplished at self-deception. After three years of grief and spiraling despair, she became aware of the role that she herself had played in that despair. By locking herself away in the fortress that had once been the most bustling exuberant house in town, she had denied herself almost all human contact out of a misguided self-preservation instinct which now had taken a toll. An accommodation would need to be made to preserve what was left of her sanity, but she still couldn’t agree to re-enter her old life in town. But, maybe a stranger. At least a stranger to her. She could rent one of the bedrooms upstairs, take on a tenant. One of the guest bedrooms had a full bath attached. It would be perfect for someone, as long as it wasn’t anyone she knew. Maybe having someone else in the house might bring greater perspective. They could exchange pleasantries in the morning, maybe share a cup of coffee. Just a few minutes a day of harmless human interaction would break through the heavy sadness that had gathered around her like a brewing storm. She would post several notices advertising the room for rent in every popular gathering spot in the three towns closest to Claremont. It would have been the perfect use for Facebook if she hadn’t deleted her account. But the condolence messages and crying emojis which had overrun the thing in the weeks after Will’s death had been too much to bear. Now, she regretted her impulsiveness. She would have to depend on homemade fliers on community bulletin boards…


“Looking for someone to rent out one of my guest bedrooms with a private en-suite bathroom in a large farmhouse sitting on twenty acres. Lots of peace and quiet, yet still close to the towns of Claremont, Richland, and Twin Forks. Rent negotiable. No cats. Call for directions. 804-616-6832.”


E. Taylor


She had labored over the paragraph for three days. This was the sort of thing that Will was good at. He would have known exactly what to say. But he wasn’t available anymore. She would have to post the thing and hope for the best. Two weeks went by without a single response. Unfortunately she had been forced to answer every call which came in to her cellphone, which meant she had endured close to a dozen painfully awkward conversations with all of the people she had been successfully ghosting for the past couple of years. Of course she could have avoided this too if she hadn’t cleared out all of the contacts on her phone on one of the darker days six months after Will’s death. Just about the time she decided that renting the room wasn’t going to work out, a knock came on the door on Thursday the 14th of May at 9:11 in the morning



She opened the front door and squinted through the screen. There stood a man carrying a back pack dropping a duffle bag on the porch at his feet. He held a folded piece of paper in his hand. He wore a clean pair of jeans and a long sleeve white t-shirt with a worn and faded Red Sox cap on his head.


She was careful to keep the screen door latched as she asked, “Yes? May I help you?”


He turned the sheet of paper and held it up for her to see. “I’m here about the room.”


His voice was deep with no discernible accent. She looked at the paper and recognized her words, her inadequacies as a writer of public notice bulletins laid bare. She had not specified that she was looking for female tenants only. And now he had asked a question which she would have to answer with a lie. The room had not been rented. He had been the first prospect. She opened her mouth to lie when he folded the paper and slid it his back pocket with the words, “I don’t have a cat.”


“You didn’t call for directions and I didn’t include an address on the flier.”


“Wasn’t hard to find. Lots of information in that flier.”


“And you’re…a man.”


“Yes. I am. Didn’t know if you were a man or a woman. It just said ‘E. Taylor’. Could have been Ed or Elizabeth. Is the fact that I’m a man a deal breaker?”


She started to feel silly for keeping the screen door locked and just a bit rude. Before Will’s death she would have invited the man inside and served him breakfast by now. Her old instincts began doing battle with her new fears. She should have been afraid and cautious for a million reasons, but the man standing on the porch appeared to have the most benign presence, a face with soft features that betrayed not the slightest suggestion of menace. She suddenly found herself unlatching the screen door and walking outside, offering him a seat at the tea table at the the far end of the porch.


“Would you like some coffee?”


“No.”


She found herself surprisingly at peace with a stranger sitting in a chair where her husband sat nearly every morning in the spring. Maybe it was his peaceful demeanor, or maybe the novelty of human interaction.


“I see where it says that the rent is ‘negotiable’. That’s a bit odd, that you were more emphatic about the no cats thing than the rent.”


“Not really,” she said. “Its just that I have never rented a room before so I don’t really know what the going rate is.”


“Do you live here alone?” His question seemed perfunctory, as if he already knew that she was alone, not creepy or calculated.


“Yes. For the past three years. Yes. Alone.”


“Awfully big house to live in all by yourself. Have you ever thought about selling? Downsizing?”


“I suppose I should, and I probably will at some point, but this is my home and I still love it, although it is a lot to keep up with.”


“So is this room you have for rent for a regular tenant or are you looking for a caretaker?”


“Oh no. Just a tenant. I can handle the chores myself.”


He stopped asking questions and began looking the porch over carefully, taking in every detail of the workmanship of its construction. He stood up to get a better look at some detail of the window casement. “Really nice work…” he said to nobody in particular.


She heard herself ask him if he wanted to see the room. He answered yes and followed her inside. She stopped at the bottom of a beautiful wooden staircase, pointed up and said, “Its the third door on the left.”


He smiled at her briefly then walked up the stairs and disappeared down the hallway. She went into the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. She could hear him shuffling around. It was the way of old houses, each room spoke to every other room. He stayed up there by himself for what seemed a long time. She wondered what he was doing, whether inviting him inside was a mistake. The coffeemaker let out its synthetic beep just as he appeared at the entrance to the kitchen.


She poured herself a cup and sat down at the table grateful to have something to do with her hands, and not knowing what to say to this strangely observant man who was now staring at every angle of her huge chef’s kitchen. Before her husband had died, she had lived in the room. Nothing in all of her life gave her more joy than conceiving of, planning for and cooking a  meal for her friends. For the last three years she quickly passed through the kitchen on her way to somewhere else, anyplace else. Why had she chosen to sit at the kitchen table with him here? 


“You have a beautiful home. Old houses like this were built differently. I find them fascinating.” He slowly walked across from the entrance to the table where she sat then stopped abruptly and looked down at the floor. He extended his right hand slowly, with all of his fingers stretched out to their full length, pointed at the floor at his feet. “But, something very sad happened here…on this very spot, I think..something very, very sad.”


She looked at him, eyes closed, head tilted sideways slightly as if he was trying to hear the story. She should have been disturbed by the scene playing out before her, this complete stranger transfixed directly over the spot where she had found her dead husband, but a calm came over her as she asked, “Who are you?”


The stranger opened his eyes at the sound of her voice, and returned to the present.


“I’m just a guy looking for a place to live.”


“No, what’s your name?”


“Gabriel.”


“You sure you don’t want some coffee, Gabriel?”


“Maybe I will. It smells good.”


“Thank you.”


She walked over to the counter and poured him a cup, then handed it to him black. He pulled out a chair and sat down. She remained standing behind the chair at the opposite end of the table. 


“You’re right about the kitchen,” she said. “Something very sad did happen here.”


“Yes. I’m sure of it. But I’m sorry for bringing it up. I didn’t want to upset you.”


“Its ok. I found my husband collapsed on that very spot three years ago, dead from a heart attack. What I can’t figure out is how you knew?”


“I didn’t know about your husband. I just know things sometimes, things I have no business knowing. See, houses tell stories, especially old houses, if you’re paying attention. But, I’m very sorry about your husband. That must have been horrible for you.”


“Yes. It was. It still is.”


“But there’s something else about this room. Despite the sadness there’s also a lot of happiness here. It feels like a place of great laughter and gaiety. Ha, I know that’s an old word, but gaiety seems to fit.”


She pulled the chair out from the table and sat down. Then she took a long sip of her coffee.


“Before Will’s death, this was very much a happy room. Some of the happiest moments of my life have been spent here.”


“Nothing happy for three years? That’s a long time.”


“Honestly, this is probably the longest amount of time I’ve spent in this kitchen since that morning. There’s just too much regret and sorrow here. I suppose you’re right that rooms tell stories.”


He finished his coffee and sat the cup down softly on the placemat, looked at her with soft eyes and said, “I can understand your sorrow. I know a thing or two about sorrow. But why regret? Certainly you don’t blame yourself for your husband’s death. You said it was a heart attack.”


She looked across the table at the stranger. She desperately wanted him to leave but couldn’t bring herself to ask him. Instead, she surprised herself by thinking clearly about the night before her husband’s death for the first time. She felt the tears forming, shocked by the vulnerability she felt with the man with the ageless face and the odd name…Gabriel. She began.


“It was his 60th birthday, the night before he died. Will wasn’t crazy about parties, although he tolerated them for my benefit. He didn’t want a big deal made over his 60th so I had invited maybe ten of our best friends to the private room at Tilly’s for dinner. It wasn’t a surprise since he hated those, so he had agreed to the plan and to the guest list. It was a delightful evening really. Will seemed to enjoy himself, or at least I thought he did. But when we got home everything went all wrong. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive myself.”


Gabriel reached into his back pocket, removed a clean white cotton handkerchief and slid it across the table to her. She picked it up and held it tightly in her hands.


“Will and I didn’t argue a lot. I mean, we disagreed often enough but never really had big fusses. But as soon as we got inside the house he made an odd comment about one of the guests at dinner that night. We are both really friends with his wife more than him, but we’ve both known them since high school. Anyway he had been seated next to me all night and I had engaged him in conversation like I always do. I didn’t think it was more or less than usual, but Will said a few uncharitable things about how I had been flirting with the guy all night. I was shocked, I really was. It was so unlike Will. Then he went what I thought was entirely too far when he brought up the fact that this man and I had dated for a month or so back in high school. 45 years ago!! After that I don’t know what happened, I just lost it. I said some ugly things and he gave as good as he got and before I knew it I had stormed out of the bedroom and slammed the door behind me in that bedroom you just looked at earlier. We spent the night in separate rooms for the first time in ages and over something so ridiculous.”


Now the tears were flowing, the handkerchief pressed to her eyes, and her words became halting and barely audible.


“I didn’t hear him when he fell. I was down the hall, further away from the kitchen. If I had been in bed with him where I belonged, I would have heard him get up, then I would have heard him fall and I could have saved him. I know CPR, I could have stabilized him and called 911. Instead, I didn’t wake up until four hours after he passed.”


Gabriel got up slowly and pulled his chair around the table to get closer. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Taylor. I can see why you might feel like taking the blame, but you’re being awfully hard on yourself. Even if you had heard him fall, there’s no guarantee you could have…”


“NO!! You don’t get it..I was flirting with him!! That’s the thing I can’t forgive myself for! Will was right! I spent the night of his birthday flirting with an old flame while I should have been paying attention to my husband. That will forever be the last memory of me he had. 


Gabriel set back in his chair and let her collect herself. It was the most awkward of silences. He looked on as she regained her composure thinking of how best to proceed. Finally he thought to say, “And thats why you so seldom come in your kitchen, to avoid your last memory of him.”


She looked up at him for the first time since she began telling her story and felt a surprising comfort for having told it. She could never have admitted such a personal failure to anyone she knew, but out of nowhere Gabriel had showed up and given her the chance.


Gabriel stood up slowly and said, “Now this is why I don’t drink a lot of coffee. It makes me so hungry!”


She smiled for the first time in months and shocked herself by asking, “Could I fix you something?”


“I suppose its been a while since you made a meal in this kitchen, but if you’re offering, I’d love an omelette.”


She smiled again and looked away, “That’s strange. I used to be kind of known for my omelettes. But its been a long time and I’m almost certain I don’t have any eggs or even cheese.”


It was Gabriel’s turn to smile. “I think if you look you’ll discover that you do.”


She opened the refrigerator and saw the dozen eggs, the cheese and butter she hadn’t remembered buying. She looked back at him, bewildered by the events of the morning.


“This is one of those things I was talking about earlier that I have no business knowing.”


He stood by the counter and watched her artful touch with eggs and cheese. She melted a slab of butter in the skillet, cracked three eggs into a clear Pyrex bowl gracefully, adding salt and pepper before whisking with a fork. After pouring the eggs into the skillet she added the ground cheddar onto the light yellow surface, never touching the mixture with anything. Instead she twisted the handle of the skillet carefully with her wrist like she had done it her entire life. When the time was right she suddenly curved the eggs over onto themselves making a perfect crescent of omelette perfection then slid it onto a plate in one tidy motion. Gabriel cut it open with the side of his fork and watched the melted cheese flow slowly out of the middle onto the plate, then took a bite.


“I’m thinking that it would be a shame for a woman of your gifts to tiptoe around this kitchen like you don’t belong here. This is divine, Mrs. Taylor.”


“It’s Eleanor. My name is Eleanor. My friends call me Elly.”


“Then, I’ll call you Elly,” Gabriel answered after taking his last bite. “But I’m afraid I won’t be renting your room. It’s lovely and all but its not the right fit. But I appreciate you seeing me without an appointment and for this amazing breakfast.”


“I must say I’m a little disappointed,” she replied. “I think it might be nice to have someone to cook for around here again.” Then she let out a quiet laugh. “I had forgotten how much I missed it.”


Gabriel stood up from the table and walked towards the front door where he had left his back pack and duffle bag. “Elly, to tell the truth, I don’t think you lack people to cook for. I bet that this town is full of people who call you ‘Elly’.”


Then he put on his backpack and threw the duffle over his shoulder and walked off the front porch, down the drive way and disappeared. It wasn’t until later that night when she found the note he had left on the bed in the guest room. He had scribbled on the back of the flier, Your omelettes are new every morning, just like his mercies.


The next morning, Elly skipped her coffee and stayed out of the kitchen. After sitting at the tea table on the porch for an hour, she got into her car and drove into town. She heard the tingling of the bell ring out as she opened the door at Tilly’s, and that most familiar of sounds gave her a delightful appetite.