Sliding Doors

“No man ever wetted clay and then left it, as if there would be bricks by chance and fortune.”

~Plutarch

Each of us is the sum of an infinity of thinly sliced seconds, where each one matters, at least to some degree. How could we ever hope to pinpoint that decisive second when things forever changed; the instant the axis of our world shifted and began to orbit in a different direction?

It might be difficult, but can be done.  Tally your life, take it apart, and turn a seemingly impossible task to tremendously simple.

I know the moment my life took its first step down an aisle it would never leave.  I ponder it often.

I pay no mind to the property values of my neighbors or the car I drive.  My family, living, and piece of mind, these are what give my rapture breath.  None would exist without the assembly of moments from this most remembered day.

I was working in a flower shop with my family on the day my life moved from middling to merit mounting.  Our shop lay at the lip of a city I’d scarcely left.  A stranger, a petite lady with eyes like chocolate almonds, had moved to town the previous year.  She had been shopping amongst our flowers for maybe a month.

Every time she passed our vibrant displays and rounded the corner to enter our doors, I’d abandon my knife, rush my phone call, or attend to some trifle that could have easily waited, had it not been in her vicinity.

Our store was in prep until ten, but she always showed up about a half hour early.  “Do you mind if I buy a few things that are already put together?”

She also knew precisely what to ask.

“Of course not,” I’d say, the words always falling behind a smile.

It was my job to keep the early birds away, but she spent enough for me to slither through rules without consequence.

Her visits grew earlier and her totals kept climbing.

I was helping her to the car on a beautiful October day, a fraction less than a month after our eyes first locked.  My arms saddled with blossoms, I saw her sashay to her space from behind a bundle of fully bloomed roses.

I blushed, squeezed by, then laid the blooms across the passenger seat of her red (orange) pickup, Texas plates in a California lot.  I arranged the bunches then turned to face her.  Her enormous coco pupils pulled my hazel ones toward them, like ore to magnet.

I cannot recall the length of this moment, only that a single bird sang and that the perfect note felt like an epiphany.

She slipped something between my fingers.  “I’m going to go broke if I keep doing it this way,” she said.  Words flew from her mouth as though escaping.  “Call me sometime, and we could talk longer, over a cup of coffee.”

Still in the dusty aftermath of my previous liaison, I said,  “I’m just at the end of a relationship.  I’m flattered, really, but I don’t think I’m ready.”

She said something then that only clinical dementia could ever steal.  “Life’s too short to be unhappy.  Think about it, then call me.”

All fifteen syllables sounded like a smile.

I did call, though two weeks drifted from the calendar.  I wasn’t playing games, only intimidated by the strength of our obvious and unexpected bond.  I found my fortitude and made up for my missing days.

I picked up the phone around 9:30 on a Friday night, the first week of November.  We talked until the sun was almost a promised fulfilled.

Monday, she left on business, but her absence did nothing to dim our exchange.  Each day after work, we exchanged words across a land line until far past midnight, each minute driving an already expensive hotel phone bill closer toward outrageous.

It was worth every single copper faced Lincoln.

She tore into town that next Friday, not even stopping to change.  We met at a Mexican restaurant in the same center as the flower shop.

That long week was prologue to my present day; a now that can be easily traced to a single moment.

The house we live in was agreed on in twilight as the two of us held hands.  A boy and a girl wait for stories each night at bedtime, snug in the cradle of my lap.  They were baked in her oven from our special recipe.  Our living is made in tandem, because she is yin to my yang and we’ve found ourselves happiest with the fewest possible pauses in conversation.

Our most intimate moments together would have never happened without her strolling into the store, slipping me her card, or telling me life’s too short to spend it even a sliver less than happy.

I often ponder the sliding doors of my life, and all those trails never taken.  Which crossroads would have dropped me somewhere else on the day my fate was delivered?

It is impossible to know.

What I do know is that I wouldn’t trade my fate for affluence beyond imagination.  There is no other life, be it prince or king, that I’d exchange for mine.  I already live a life of abundance and can draw a time line and place my pointer on the precise moment that brought it to me.

Writer Dad

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