Heartcrossings

Many winters ago I received a holiday gift of an OXO vegetable peeler shaped like a Y from a vendor we worked with at the time. While I never owned a lot of kitchen doodads, this peeler was love at first sight and a love that has never dimmed. It changed the whole nature of potato peeling for me.  Focus moved from the act of peeling to what might follow from there. What would be created and what level of perfection may the potato achieve. These were never the concerns at potato peeling in the past. It was necessary to focus on safety, reducing discomfort and successful completion of the job.  About a year ago I accidentally left the peeler on a hot stove top and a part of the handle melted. The peeler became a less perfect to hold, the ding made it rough to touch. It was harder now to focus on the perfection after instead of the mundane act of peeling the potato.  The arc of the OXO peeler’s life in my kitchen drawer is not that different from that of my own....

I imagine the scudding silver of the rental car, zip across the Golden Gate Bridge. Had I been there tonight, we would have held hands. Stopped to look down Into the starlit Bay. The place we wanted to be in youths that have long passed The dreams that were meant  not to be. Yet I caught glimpses now and again, through eyes of love and loss, in morning fog and the against cloudless cerulean. I imagine you past the other end bridge of gold behind you, the  silver dart of what remains ahead of our lives in the last half.

Recently while discussing her boyfriends and heartbreak with by young friend L, I found myself thinking about the nature of love and how the moments when I have most intensely experienced it bordered on pain. The birth of J was one of them. Holding her in my arms was a life changing experience. From being frail, vulnerable and unsure about what next in crumbling marriage, I went to feeling like I had some super-power that could not be contained. Yet there was no euphoria. A mundane analogy to describe it would be a dry faucet on a hot summer's day that suddenly starts to gush water furiously and will not stop. There comes a point after which thirst and need is satiated but the flood continues unabated.  Thinking back that was my first contact with true love. It is hard to know what exactly to do with it. The second experience came much later in life and it was borne out of sharing the deepest pain, willingly letting myself experience another person's darkest days as if they w...