Just When You Think You Know Someone

Stumbled onto a heavy conversation yesterday in the cage. One of my friends at work was talking about the day twenty years ago when her big brother died. He’d been farther into drugs than is healthy and was too Quaaluded to swim when he fell out of the boat. Just like that one day her big brother was gone. What she remembers most vividly all these years later is going to clean out his apartment and finding a plate of peanut butter and crackers neatly arranged, wrapped in plastic and set in the refrigerator for a later that never came. She talked about how hard it was for her idolized (if flawed) big brother to be gone. Then she talked about how just six months before that her husband had left her for a younger woman. My friend was twenty-four at the time. Twenty-four. What does a year like that do to someone? Who might she have been? How did she find the grace to forgive? We’ve worked together for nearly four years now and, come to find out, I never knew her at all. I suppose I still don’t. Suddenly lots of things she’d said before make more sense. (Incidentally, this is part of why judging people gets so tricky—you just never have all the information.) Amazing how you can spend forty hours a week with someone for years and talk and leave so much still buried. Takes a long time to begin to know someone. God give me patience.

Repeat after me—My job is not a waste of time. My job is not a waste of time. My job is not a waste of time…