Good news, bad news: there’s always something happening, somewhere, to someone. Sometimes it hits closer to home than others, and sometimes it lets you live vicariously for a moment, re-living or anticipating or struck suddenly dumb by the awful and visceral realization that things can happen at any time, out of the blue, for reasons completely out of your control.
2 weeks ago, a friend got a job that might have been written expressly for her, and coming as it did after she had thrown caution to the winds and made a leap of faith to abandon her previous corporate rat-race career for an artistic and world-bettering role, it seemed like the stars were lining up in providence.
A week and a half ago, a friend was the victim of a senseless shooting at the school where she works, watching and waiting in horror and unable to do anything but survive while one colleague was killed and another injured.
On Thursday, a friend of mine called to tell me the wonderful news that she is finally pregnant. She inherited 2 degenerative eye diseases and has had a terrifying time the last 2 years as her eyesight has rapidly declined, leaving her legally blind with a small and blurry field of vision. Despite surgery and every possible tactic the medical community could muster to combat the degeneration, there is a good chance that within the next few years her eyesight will fade all together. Some time ago, we talked about pregnancy and her fears and sadness that she would never be able to see her own child. Now it looks like she will.
Tonight, we are hosting a crayfish party…an annual late summer event in Sweden, and one that we traditionally celebrate with the group of friends from Anders’ childhood and Scouting background. There are 6 couples and we see them fairly frequently throughout the year, most notably at midsummer and for the crayfish feast which is hosted in turn. One couple called this morning to tell us they won’t be able to make it, because last Thursday her brother-in-law was killed in a car accident when someone ran head-on through an intersection into the driver’s side.
Brightness and darkness, 2 sides of the same shiny coin we call life. When it’s flipped in the air, there’s no telling if it will come down heads or tails.