Perfect Days

Since yesterday, I’ve been thinking a lot about what made those perfect days for us.  Many things, really.  Many indescribable - in words.  Mostly feelings, mostly things we’ll never be able to print in black and white, as gray was and is, a color of perfection and ambiguity.  So are green, indigo, red, blue (always blue), white, yellow, purple, and most other colors of the spectum, although rarely orange (for me, anyway).

Dave and I spent today with no obligations, and that just doesn’t happen often.  We dealt with our morning duties, phone calls, errands, and finally, we faced a lull.  We decided to take a drive.  The ocean was our destination.  We began the trip with a fair amount of hope and comfort, an abandonment of all things necessary.

Not long after we left the house, we realized we would want coffee for the drive.  We weren’t aware of any coffee houses along the way, so simply drove, and figured we would find a caffeine purveyor along the way.  Once we did, we were disappointed in the contents of our to-go cups.  Because we found our coffee in a place with which I was familiar, I was forced back in time.  The place, was the Valley Ford grocery store, where Nat, Owen, and I had stopped on our morning drives to school, so many years ago now.  That drive took about 45 minutes, while they were in elementary and middle school (Owen, the younger). 

I looked around the store, but failed to see the famous “sticky buns” we’d bought on those mornings, faint in my memory now.  I asked the cashier if they still sold them, and she said, yes, they’re right over there by the coffee.  I found them.  I picked one up, showed it to Dave, and placed it carefully back on the counter.  Just picking it up, rendered me useless for a few moments.  We took our coffees (seriously lacking in attention by the coffee maker, but enough to fake our way back to the car, thinking we would enjoy our beverages).

We drove toward the coast, I drifted in and out of sleep, and Dave steered the car toward the sea and sun, unaware that my half-consciousness was attached to avoiding my past.  In our brief conversations, those during my intermittent waking moments, he understood my difficulty in entering the territory of those years when Owen and Nat were youngsters, and he (Dave) was still a part of his first family.  We were entering a time and place belonging to my life before I knew him, and he drove forward in an effort to integrate all of our years, together, and prior to our introduction - and those that were part of his blending into our small family.  We were all so tender back then, wondering what, if anything would come of our odd encounters.

Tonight, we watched, The Girl and the Cafe, a movie Owen and I watched repeatedly on several evenings, because we liked the story, and the universal theme.  We talked a lot about world finances and how they affected our lives, and those of others around the globe.  We talked of the innocence of love between people who would not normally encounter one another.  And, we talked of the inevitability of forces larger than ourselves, that while they could make a difference, rarely did.

Today was, for all our pain and loss, a perfect day.  Odd, to think we can still have them, despite our difficulties in facing them.

Video for the night: The Girl in the Cafe, Nicholas Hooper is listed as responsible for the music on the credits to the movie, but I can’t find anything by him related to this HBO movie.  I don’t know who sings the song playing behind the video.  If you know, please let me know…thanks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQLh2YkOguI&NR=1

~ by Linda on March 2, 2008.