Last evening after visiting my favorite curmudgeon, I struggled into the front seat of my car.  For some reason, its adjustment had been moved and I no longer found it easy to glide behind the steering wheel which  pressed against my chest.  I got the key turned and my window open and drew in gigantic gulps of air as I fought off my claustrophobia.

A half-mile from the place where Jay lives, my phone rang.  I steered the car to the curb and answered, hearing my friend Penny’s voice.  I love the cadence of her speech, the familiar twang of home flavored with the rounding of nearly half a lifetime on the western edge of Missouri.  She offered to make coffee, early enough for me to be home before the witching hour, and I made a wide U-turn heading back into Kansas and northward, to Roeland Park.

She handed me a heavy ceramic mug, no doubt thrown by a potter she knows.  I slid into the chair she always warns me will fall backward, a Southwestern style wood chair which probably weighs more than I do.  She sits to my right, and we begin to navigate the vagaries of our respective weeks, but mostly of mine.  I find it hard not to complain, not to cry, not to ask over and over again why.

A couple of hours later I’m home and I’m talking to Jessica.  She’s got real heartache:  the death of her father, tarnish splashed on her images of life, the unexpected turn in her road.  I fall silent about my own troubles until she leaves.  Then I try to write and I’m looking at a blank computer screen when Penny calls to tell me she loves me.  Then I dissolve. Life overwhelms me.  And Penny, being Penny, listens, and soothes, and tells me, over, and over, and over, that she loves me.

No matter how difficult my life becomes, there’s always another cup of coffee to be had, always another friend — or the same one — to sit across from the table and hand over the Kleenex, waiting for the flood gates to open and disgorge the wall of water which they have restrained.  And when the waters settle, and the Kleenex lie crumpled around me, that friend pours another cup of coffee, and we  let the silence surround us.  In the silence, at times, we can heal.

The mug that Pat Reynolds gave me, sitting on a tile trivet from my mother.