One last note on the Birkenstocks: they were my half of a Christmas gift certificate to the two of us, and the more I try them on the more I love them. I love being able to say I got that much out of my relative’s generosity, and mine was only the half of it!
Nina and Rod, meantime, came by to pick up their Mel and Kris mugs–an excuse to hang out. And this was after a pot-luck get-together to see our mutual friend Johnna visiting from Vermont.
It is amazing how the few minutes we spend together in person can have such an outsize effect forever after.
I said to one friend of Johnna’s I met tonight that when we moved here, my best friend in New Hampshire had been Nina’s old college friend, and so when we moved here Nina and Rod had invited us over for dinner on moving-in day, not knowing us from Adam but just because we were Virginia’s friends and because they knew what it was like to deal with movers and the upheaval of being in a strange place.
When I added, And that dinner was Nina’s first attempt at putting on a Seder, the woman I was talking to looked at me with big eyes and exclaimed, Wow.
She knew what that meant–and from that moment Nina was someone she knew would be a friend to her in an instant, too, whom she felt like one to in return already.
That invitation and that incredible dinner twenty-seven years ago continue to keep on being a blessing. I could run into this new friend again ten years from now and what she will remember about me is that I have an incredibly good person in my life and that she wanted on the spot to be like that too.
Me too.
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