Happy Accidents

The warmest day of the year so far called for breakfast on the patio with sunglasses and the Style section of last Sunday's paper. The neighbors were tearing down an old shed, but I was too absorbed in the sun hitting my face to notice. I cleaned up the kitchen, did a little yard work, and lunch was also on the patio, with another section of the paper. Bread dough rises in a bowl on the tile table in the sun. Life is good.

I started scraping old paint off the back side of the garage, not a bad job if you don't mind a little elbow grease in alternating arms - wax on, wax off - and it's kind of satisfying to smooth out a rough, peeling 80-year-old coat of dark brown paint, getting the point of the scraper down into the grooves between the boards right down to the naked wood. I took a turn scraping, then Gven took a turn while I took a break to knead the bread. Gven is the resident painter, so I will leave the fun part - priming and painting - to her.

Zelda came over for dinner, so I had to stop scraping to start a fire in the Weber, which has survived another winter out in the weather, though its days are numbered. We grilled turkey burgers, but first we grilled Zelda about her trip to New Orleans with her friends for another friend's wedding. She liked the Garden District and will live there someday when she's rich. The French Quarter, at least the touristy stretch of Bourbon Street, was not so great. The reception was in a nice hotel across from Jackson Square, with good food, open bar, a good band, and a view of the river.

The turkey burgers were a little, uh, well done on the outside but still juicy in the middle and delicious with potato salad. I made the fire extra hot to simulate the classic Cajun cuisine of Chez Sven's Norwegian Creole blackened turkey burgers, known only to an obscure bayou colony of beignet-eating crab catchers. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

We lit a candle and ate cherry pie a la mode. The embers made their way from the Weber into the brick fire pit and turned into a campfire. Gven and Zelda went inside, never running out of things to talk about, and I stationed myself in the Adirondack chair off to the side of the fire pit. A big bird perched on a low limb of the maple tree in the front yard, just visible over the roof from the back yard. It was bigger than any hawk I've seen, thick around the middle; it might have been an owl. It flew past me, swooping down across the back yard and up through the pine trees, wingspan must have been six feet or more, and then was gone in an instant.

The next day something rather odd and a little embarrassing happened at the morning meditation. While drinking tea, I talked to a tall woman I hadn't seen before about choosing - or finding - the right practice. She told an interesting story about meditating while bicycling in Arizona, but before we could continue the conversation, other people's conversations and a moment of awkwardness intervened. While I drank my green tea, I saw an article open on the table about how certain personality types fit certain practices, so if you know one you can infer the other. Interesting.

Halfway through the article, someone else recognized me from a drumming group that meets at the rec center, and I realized why they looked so familiar. I knew them from somewhere but hadn't figured out where. Having established where we knew each other from, we talked about this and that, and I said something about taiji. They asked if I also do qigong, and it turns out they used to do qigong in the same group I did many moons ago at a church I no longer attend. It took me a minute. They looked different from the people I remembered from the little qigong group, but I probably looked different too.

I hope I have a chance to renew both of those chance encounters. It seems a shame to waste an opportunity to make a connection with someone who is working on a similar endeavor, and second chances are never guaranteed. As Dorothy observed in Oz, people come and go so quickly here.