lovebirds/hambones Faye and Rick

11:25 am

“What time will you be back?” Emil wanted to know, as Scott and I were going out the door to meet Rick and Faye for supper.

“Likely around midnight; I don’t know for sure. We’ll be gone for the whole evening, anyway,” I said.

We’d had a drink at their farmhouse, then gone together to a Kelvington restaurant, then returned to their place for a delicious dessert and a couple shots of sambuca before making our way home carefully cross-country, on slippery roads. Scott drove and I mused silently about whether I would feel, at the time of my dying, that my time on earth had been worthwhile. What would I have to have done, to make it so? These moonlit drives are the ideal incubators of such thoughts; they bring a kind of perfect clarity.

I’d have to feel I had loved much, and obviously so— that those I love had benefited from my caring. That’s all. I don’t need to leave property or money or a great book or an impressive social achievement that makes strangers say Wow, what a woman. Just people whose lives were a little richer because I loved them and they knew it.