Intersection

Yesterday I was driving a friend from hospital to a sober home in Huntington Beach following the map-voice from my phone and so immersed in conversation that I only suddenly became aware of the tall building now filling my windshield. Hadn’t been at this intersection in decades possibly, and it all flooded back in an instant. Count up four rows of blue glass and back some thirty years, and I am sitting behind the window near the middle as communications director for a health care firm and had just seen Marian for the first time as a temp hire placed just outside my door. She only sat there for three months, and I didn’t see her again for over four years, but next Wednesday is our 23rd wedding anniversary, so you know there’s much more to that story.

Amazing how life moves us in ever widening circles, bringing us back again and again like time travelers to scenes that mark our passage. By nature, intersections cross divergent streams for an instant, at specific points, and then release them again. Like taking the far edges of a blanket and bringing them together to fold, points in our lives separated by so much time are pressed together for a moment of consideration–for the smile or the tear, the smiling tear that acknowledges the span.

Sitting there waiting for the light, the man behind the windshield and the one behind the blue glass are the same, but would the young man looking out approve, identify with the elder down at the intersection?  Looking up, would the elder welcome such youthful approval or see it only as evidence of life long lessons yet unlearned?

At the intersection waiting for the light, it’s hard to know such stuff. But twenty three years next Wednesday with the woman who knows us both…

I’ve got that going for me.