The two women stood just far enough inside the front windows of the café to be safe. It was a garden café, or had been, and they had planned a long lunch at the little umbrella tables under the trees. They came in sunshine and had mostly finished their salads when the sky darkened and a hail storm was upon them. Not just a small brisk pelting, but a roaring avalanche of the kind of falling ice that was compared to golf balls but was even bigger and more jagged. The onslaught was fast, came quickly and then stalled, so that the canvas umbrellas were torn and chairs were overturned as people scrambled to take cover inside. The wall-sized plate glass windows had cracked, but none had broken, partly because they were retractable and had been pushed mostly into the walls because the weather was so nice.
The electricity had stayed on and now that things had calmed into a chilling cold and the sound of distant sirens, the management had declared hot coffee for everyone, no charge. Most people had left but the two friends lingered, sipping their hot liquid and adjusting to the catastrophe. "I suppose it's really local," remarked M, "I mean compared to the floods and fires that have been in the news."
"We'll be dealing with it when our clients come in." The two were therapists, had met during their campus time when they were earning their doctoral degrees. Across the street a big dog emerged from some hiding place and ran somewhere across the drifts and windrows of ice pellets. "I hope he's going home," said J. "I always wonder what the animals think when something like this happens."
"I suppose they don't ask questions -- just act as the opportunity offers. No existential dilemmas to be answered." They hesitated to sit, as though there might be a reason to run at any moment. But there was something fascinating about the smashed dishes and scattered flatware. The linen napkins were blown around the patio. Over everything was a carpet of leaves torn off trees at the tips of branches, still attached in bunches to bits of twig. It was still June. There would be more leaves later.
They sipped and pondered. "How is our friend doing?" He was a colleague who had become a patient. His practice had focused on HIV, not research but clinically, and he himself had caught the virus pretty early. No one asked how. They knew that he had stayed state-of-the-art in terms of meds and general health care, but HIV is a vulnerability disease, since it afflicts the body's self-defense, so that something minor could quickly become major. To have HIV move from the simple presence of the virus to the distressed state of AIDS was not just physical, but also an emotional and intellectual hurricane. Professionals who had been taught to be entirely rational had to learn a new way of thinking. The difference for this idealist was accepting that people on the fringes of society were often the sickest, the earliest and the most likely to be undetected and die. Most of society just walled them off. He never got over the injustice of it.
"Since he's needed hospice, he is bitter and wants to be alone. He won't let anyone comfort him or even remind him of anything positive about his achievements."
"It doesn't say much about our own work if we can't even understand our own people." M. took their now empty mugs to carry them to the counter. She kept her head down and turned away to hide tears. It wasn't that she cared more for their friend, but that she had her own vulnerability to loss. When she came back, she said, "We can't prevent people from having their own troublesome emotions. Just to understand and survive them, find ways to convert them into growth."
"Sounds damned high-flown to me. I wish I'd put my emergency rain hat in my pocket." Her light coat was over her arm and she fumbled with it to get a hand into the pockets in hopes that somehow she had put in her hat after all.
"It's not raining now."
"The trees are still dripping."
J. felt the still unfinished business. "How are your Measle Mom's doing now that you've organized them into a group? Have they understood that they nearly killed their own children for a fantasy understanding of what nature is -- a hard-hearted bitch. And all the time they were protected themselves because they had had the vaccine back in the day when medicine was still a miracle."
"They're about to increase their understanding a good deal. I'm bringing in a woman whose child died. She's low income and delayed going to the doc, but it probably didn't matter. The child just didn't have the endurance that others have. Early nutrition, weak genes, who knows? I hope we can come to some kind of enlightenment or at least endurance."
J. put her arm around her friend. "Some things in life are simply not preventable -- the deaths of others and failures of our selves to control everything, to be irreproachable. It's not just tragedies but how we take them. Clichés. Can't help it."
"These other moms have always been 'above reproach' as the phrase goes. They had so much support that when they made mistakes, others covered for them, rationalized. They never really had to deal with it."
"Neither have we." They half-laughed, bitterly.
The fashionable café was normalizing again as a new set of people came in. Maybe the talk was a little louder and more high-pitched than usual. Even so, the sputter and hiss of the cappacino machine continued non-stop. "I hope no trees have crashed onto the roads."
As they walked to their cars, stepping over an occasional branch but seeing no trees on the ground, their minds went back to the concern that was always thereL what to say to their dying friend in hospice. M. ventured, "We're still able to have an occasional quiet hour together in case he wants to talk, but he doesn't say much. Sometimes he weeps. I just stay there. To be with him."
___________
(This gizmo of two women talking recurs in my blog. Two previous ones are at 8-5-18 and 12-19-17. I can't remember their names, but one of these uses the initials M and J. Sometimes I don't need names anyway. The idea is to get thoughts across without naming anyone. There are more early examples, but I failed to tag them.)
No comments:
Post a Comment