Her voice heavy with French accent she told me of a father who was very negative, a dad who worried about everything. And under her smiling exterior, could be seen the reach of a powerful woman who had looked into the face of her past. A person who had tenderly embraced the stressed child she carried within...

Her name was Stephanie, and, in releasing the words that originally polarized me from her, I found the heart of a Doll...

Extroverted and strongly opinionated he was. The kind of guy many would call intimidating, aggressive, or for some, maybe even annoying. But as he dropped his salesman pitch, he exposed a softer underbelly.

Then, like a purifying lightning bolt, it hit me. Rachel’s most romantic comment called me out as I thought about what’s ultimately ahead for us all... 

She appeared about fifty yards to the right of where I stopped. A red light to change – a left turn away from the beginning of my drive home. Over her shoulder a bike, around her neck a flat inner tube, and in her hand, a dismantled rim and tire. Her face was grimaced, and once having to carry my broken bike for three miles out of mountain bike disaster, I knew how she must have been feeling: cold, tired, frustrated, in pain, and just wanting to be home...

So it is with this subtext I’ll talk of a stranger I met on a hot summer day. A giant of a man who I ran into as he sat under the cooling shade of a tree, silent and withdrawn he was as his sheer stature took a dominant section of a city bench. Intimidating is an understatement to describe him, and it would have been way too easy for me to cast a profile. To make assumptions as to his attitude or intent, but there was something about him that drew me in. I took a seat on what remained of the bench. So it is with this subtext I’ll talk of a stranger I met on a hot summer day. 

 

The day started at around 8am, a morning split between in-laws homes as a functional/dysfunctional mix of family dynamics, that dependent on who got the most sleep, rose and fell. Yes, it was the day before Christmas and dinner prep was front and center, and with it came all the usual distractions one might expect at a family gathering...

He looked into my eyes as I asked him a leading question as to who he was… He paused, and as many a good Rabbi does, poised himself in contemplative thought. I could almost her the still air as the room grew silent, then he said, “Maybe it’s not me you want to know about, perhaps you’re on a journey to find yourself.”

He stood at the edge of the sand, a walking path where in his almost nude, most likely waxed, and very public form; he twisted his barbershop quartet mustache as a not so assuming tourist posed by his side... 

"It was as if an Angel had reached past the darkness of temporary scarecrows and brought forward ghosts in the closet. A whispering voice that did not originate in my sub-conscious, but rather flowed out of her eyes, and as it did, it ran into my very soul..."