“Let’s go to lunch.”
An invitation.
I think that’s usually how things hatch.
A quick flashback that I think illustrates a lot: I’m about done with graduate school and
in a bar (Sprite for me – has to be said – I can never blame my poor
performances on being inebriated).
We are a party of three – myself, a friend, and our 20th-Century
British Literature professor whom I respect a great deal. We are celebrating/mourning the conclusion of our
final semester. A homeless man
staggers in. Stumbles into a table;
knocks down a couple of chairs.
His hands are wrapped in long, trailing dirty bandages (hand to heaven –
can’t make this stuff up), and he’s carrying an enormous bunch of gladiolas. He looks around. He walks over to our table and holds
the flowers – stems tangled with his bandages – out to me. My friend’s face across from me – the
disgust I see there adds to my embarrassment? confusion? own disgust? There’s a nothingness while I sit mutely with one hand on my
empty glass. Our professor touches
me on the arm and says softly, “Say, ‘Thank you.’” I reach out and take the offered flowers and say too loudly,
too crispy, “Thank you.” He turns
and walks back out the door. I sit
there with a pile of flowers on my lap and my professor concludes the most
important lesson she ever taught me, “Always say, ‘Yes.’ Every great story exists because
something is presented, and the protagonist says, ‘Yes.’”
My style of acceptance is often about
as fierce and/or elegant as Bilbo Baggins, but I have tried to remember what
she taught me.
Of course it was easy to say yes to a lunch invitation. It
ended up being the first of many such outings with a lovely, insightful, smart
mom at my kids’ school. What was
our central topic? Home
schooling. We had different viewpoints,
but unbeknownst to each other we both had had these little eggs forming. Note: it’s important to mention that
watching somebody else’s egg form does a lot to form your own egg.
From those meetings came my concrete reasons for home schooling.
