Goodbye Michele

I got up early this morning...five...and immediately started working. By seven, I had seven pages of the new book. I posted a new lesson for a workshop I'm teaching, and then went to work finishing the third of three short stories I plan to self-publish.

I was truly on a roll until I paused to make coffee and read the newspaper and saw the obituary of one of my favorite friends from my past. Now, work is the last thing I want to do.

Michele and I met when she took my job at a law firm. I'd been fired. (You may laugh. I had many rough beginnings in life. I suppose I'll always be a little clumsy and clunky! :P) And she was fresh out of high school. She'd aced the typing and shorthand classes and was ready to do a job that had stumped me.

That amazed me, so I kind of watched her curiously, because my new job was right down the hall from the job from which I'd been fired! (The seventies were wacky times.) Anyway, she was smart and very nice, but also kind of crazy.

I liked crazy. I didn't have to be afraid of making stupid comments around her because she got my humor. But better than that she was one of the first people to encourage me as a writer.

We used to stand in Central Park at lunchtime and make up stories about the people hustling to lunch or ambling back to work from lunch. We tried to figure out what kind of families they had, or if they had kids, or if they were cheating...and eventually our stories got so outrageous they knit together like a soap opera and we called it Love of Lunch.

We drifted apart after I got married, and almost rekindled our friendship when we found ourselves working at the same law firm a few years later, but Michele moved on to bigger and better things.

But I never forgot Love of Lunch or the wonderfully normal way she made me feel about being just a tad crazy!

Rest in peace, Michele.

s

PS If you're a writer looking for one of the writing-lesson posts...just scroll down!