Soul Mates

I just finished reading a good book - Knit in Comfort, by Isabel Sharpe (my new favorite author) - in which there's a group of women who get together periodically to knit. One character always shakes up the group by asking a very personal question that everyone has to answer.

In real life, that character is my friend Holly. Whenever a group of our co-workers get together, she will interrupt the ordinary chitchat at some point, and ask a provocative question. Once it was to share the most useful advice someone gave you before you married. Once it was to tell about a woman in your life who was an important role model and why.

I am lousy at these kinds of questions, and generally wait until close to the end, to give myself time to think of a reasonable answer. But in the meantime, there are funny answers, and poignant answers, and we all wind up being terribly moved, sometimes even teary, and feeling closer to one another by the time we're done. The questions are simple, on the face of it.  But they draw the conversations into new territory, thoughtful territory.  These wind up being the best get-togethers. (Although there is one woman who stopped coming to these parties, because she just hates being put on the spot that way. So there's the down side.)

But it doesn't always work. I just heard this story from my friend Kathy, who came back from a weekend up north. She was sitting around a campfire with her husband and kids and the extended family of some friends of theirs, when an older aunt asked everyone whether they're married to their soulmates. And all those poor souls had to go around the circle, in front of their spouses and kids, and answer the question.

Kathy said that one of the most common answers was "sometimes," which is as close to a safe answer as that question will let you get. That's what her husband answered. Kathy managed to get out of answering at all, which is a skill I would like to learn from her. But then she thought about it more that night and came up with her answer. She said that her husband is like her right arm. Most of the time she doesn't give it much thought at all, although when she thinks about it, she knows it's important. But if she were ever to lose it, she would miss it just terribly.

After close to 20 years of marriage, that's really not a bad way to think of your husband.

Day Count: 11