Work has been busy the past few days.
Sitting in the doctor’s office the other day, I was privileged to chat
with yet another women recently widowed, who needed someone to talk to
about the miracle of love, a love she lost just 8 months ago.
The awe and wonder in her voice is
something I share, feeling a bit bedazzled by the miracle of love, the
synchronicity of events that must line up to make that happen. Grieving
the loss yes, but also pouring over those memories and wondering how in
the world she ever got so lucky. So many women have such a great need to
try to explain what happened to them, to tell me who and what this man
they married was all about, to pay tribute to their lost loves and to
the miracle of it all.
She told me a lovely tale of having been
engaged to this devilishly handsome doctor with turquoise eyes, well
off, who often took her skiing to exotic places on dates. Although he
had never actually proposed they were discussing wedding venues, guest
lists, and china patterns. Everyone told her she had landed Mr. Right,
he was the catch of the day, God’s gift to women, or so people said. She
told me she was quite attractive herself, had a great figure, and a red
satin bathing suit that was the envy of all. They were a golden couple
indeed, and she felt like a movie star. It was a fairytale right out of
Hollywood.
She was a nurse and one day while she was
working in the hospital, a man came to the back door, where she would
toss out stale water from the patient’s bedsides. When she opened the
door she nearly doused him. It was still the tail end of the Great
Depression where she lived and he was a salesman, selling paint brushes.
He was a sad-looking man, torn suit, carrot orange curls in need of a
cut, freckles and splotchy skin, the precise opposite of handsome.
Having nearly doused him with water, she
apologized and shook his hand, and in that moment she just knew
instantly that her life would never be the same. He was quiet, poor,
unattractive, but there was just something there that called to her.
Bold as brass, he showed up at her door a
few days later, with a huge bouquet and a box of chocolates and the man
with the turquoise eyes was all but forgotten. Only a few months later,
they got married. She had her whole life planned out, was doing
everything “right,” and then along came carrot top and turned her world
upside down. He went on to make his fortune and they spent 60 blissful
years together.
Five years later when she had just gone
back to work after her first child, she encountered the remnants of her
man with the turquoise eyes. He had gotten married, abandoned his wife
with two little kids, and he was God’s gift to women alright, as in he
was gifting himself to women right and left and leaving a trail of
collateral damage in his wake. “That could have been me,” she said, “if
love had not blindsided me at the back door of that hospital so long
ago.”
That evening she burned the red satin
bathing suit on a rubbish pile in her backyard. “I don’t miss the man
with the turquoise eyes,” she tells me, “but I sure do miss that bathing
suit.”
“I don’t understand people who say
marriage is hard work,” she tells me. “You just count your blessings
everyday and don’t try to change people.”
Words of wisdom from a
fine-looking woman in a red satin bathing suit, who once thought she
loved a man with turquoise eyes.
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