the lobby bar

stepping off the elevator, i knew immediately that something was wrong. i think it was the sound, a combination of forced silence and panic, a controlled chaos. instinctively, i walked toward the chaos, toward the lobby bar. i saw her, a middle-aged woman with dark hair lying lifeless on the floor. it took me a moment to understand what was happening: one person was doing chest compressions and one person was breathing into her mouth.

a bystander counted aloud, “one, two, three, four, five, BREATHE, one, two, three, four, five, BREATHE.”

i hung on to his every word.

random, hushed voices filled the air.

“i don’t know what happened, she walked off the elevator a few minutes ago and sat down at the bar. then she just fell over.”

“do you think she’s going to make it?”

“who is she?”

“did someone call 911?”

the paramedics arrived moments later and took over the resuscitation attempt. their efforts to clear the lobby were unsuccessful, so they got to work in spite of the audience. one paramedic cut off the woman’s shirt and applied the defibrillator conductors to her skin. as they yelled, “CLEAR!” her body convulsed and vomit expelled from her mouth. it was the only time i saw her move. i knew she was dead.

what i didn’t know is that an hour before, the woman was eating dinner upstairs one table away from me. she had children and a husband waiting for her at home. she wasn’t sick. her heart just stopped, without warning, and just like that, her life was over.

i walked home that night with a group of friends. not one of us said a word, but i know we were all thinking the same thing: i just saw a woman die.

as we walked in silence, i started to count my own footsteps — one, two, three, four, five –not at all unlike the counting heard earlier that evening. each count, another moment of my life gone; each count, a moment closer to my own ending.

life is more fragile than we will ever know.

smile

if you’re going to smile, smile like this*.

*He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.  (nick’s first impression of jay gatsby, f. scott fitzgerald)

“meet me in montauk”

joel and clementine. 

thanks to my sister, i finally met them this past weekend, and i’m glad i did.

emotionally withdrawn meets free spirit on a train.  they are unexplicably drawn to each other despite their obvious differences.  unbeknownst to them, they are, in fact, former lovers who will fall in love again.

i love their story. i love that, despite all the crazy things they do, life or fate or love (or whatever you call it) keeps bringing them back together. it’s a modern day tale of soulmates.

try as you might, you just can’t erase a love like that.

community

there i was, minding my own business, blogging — a cute little story here, a deep thought or two there — i was comfortable with my smallish, understated blog, my little home on the vast internet, known only by a few friends.

and then, the day i posted my story about being a smart-mouthed eight-year-old, the hits started coming. by the day’s end, i would have not only the second fastest growing blog, but also the number 72 blog on all of wordpress.

what happened? funny, i asked myself the same thing. it turns out that pz myers linked to my blog. he’s a biologist and an associate professor at the university of minnesota, morris and he found my story interesting.

sometimes i forget that the internet can actually make good things happen. it can bring people together, it can foster community, and it can let us see things through the eyes of another. it makes me believe that, just maybe, if we all listened to each other, we would find more commonalities than differences.

lunar eclipse

growing up catholic, i remember one particularly interesting day of sunday school.  i was eight and the topic of the day was faith and how we, humans, cannot always rely on physical proof for certain things.  of course, at the center of the talk was the existence of god, but mr. d began with a different example.

“how many of us think that the world is round?” he began.  all the hands in the room went up, except for the two kids sleeping in the back of the room. 

“okay, good.  but how do you KNOW that?”  a few kids talked about the shape of the globe and about circumnativation by explorers and about the astronauts looking at the earth from space. 

“those are all very convincing arguments, but how many of you have actually seen the earth from space or circumnavigated the world?”  no hands moved.  “so not one of us has personally observed the world to be round.  interesting.  yet we all believe it to be true.  we believe something that we cannot see with our own eyes.”  mr. d was close to making his point about faith and god and then a hand went up in the room.  it was my hand.

“yes, heather?”

“i know that the world is round because i have seen it,” i began.

“really?  how have you seen it, heather?”  mr. d questioned.

“well, i’ve seen it because i’ve seen a lunar eclipse.  when the earth moves between the sun and the moon, the shadow of the earth passes over the surface of the moon.  and the shadow i saw was most certainly of a round world,”  i concluded.

“interesting.  let’s take a break.”

and with that, the class filtered out into the halls.  mr. d stayed in the classroom and when the students returned, he went on to finish his talk about god and faith and believing without proof.  he never went back to his original point about the world being round.  at the time, i felt so smart for making such an ‘intelligent’ comment and for breaking the logic of mr. d’s argument.  but now i’m not so sure.

i do know that i’ve seen many lunar eclipses over my years and they are still as magical as when i was eight and full of answers.

there happens to be a total lunar eclipse tonight beginning at 20:43.  i will be watching.  you should join me.  

music

i’ve started playing again. the piano, that is.

as a child, i was always drawn to the piano. i started lessons in the 5th grade and my parents bought a used upright that found a home in our living room. the notes and the music made sense to me and i learned quickly. beginner, intermediate, advanced, i went through all of the books with ease and with remarkably little practice. and then, it happened. i stopped playing. i didn’t feel ‘it’ any more. my relationship with the piano came to an abrupt and bitter end. i stopped taking lessons and the piano in the living room fell silent.

i’m not exactly sure what happened, i think it was probably high school.   friends and boys and popular music took the place of my piano and we grew estranged.

years passed.   high school and college came and went and then i started to miss the piano. only i felt that i had betrayed it so many years ago. i felt that i wouldn’t be able to play the way i did when i was a child. i was afraid my fingers had forgotten. i was afraid the piano wouldn’t accept me again.  i was afraid to try.

so i let more years pass. and then in december, i couldn’t fight it any more. i broke down and bought a keyboard. i uncovered all of my old music books and i started playing. i’ll admit, my fingers were rusty and slow at first, but everything came flooding back in a matter of weeks. it was an amazing feeling to make music. i never want to lose it again.

yep, i voted

winter weather

it’s funny how a few years can completely change your perspective on things.

here it is, the middle of February and i’m at work, trying to work, but i’m distracted by the white stuff on the ground outside my window and the frozen stuff that is rumored to start falling within the hour.  a few, short years ago, i would be praying for snow, ice, sleet, ANYTHING that might cause a delay in class or provide a reasonable excuse to get out of work.  today, however, in my grown-up life and my real job, i am trying to will away the winter weather, or at least raise the temperature enough to keep the precipitation in a liquid state.

it’s true, snow days no longer carry the same promise of fun as they did in my youth. thankfully, one thing hasn’t changed:  the world covered in a blanket of white still looks and feels like magic.  i hope it always does.