The giraffe and the salmon.

Today my body is rejecting me. It is repulsed by my incredible consumption of gin martinis and champagne and wine at last night's wedding. It is so disgruntled and unimpressed that it is dappling my outer shell with beads of unattractive sweat in inconvenient places, banging my insides with invisible fists and threatening to make each precious inhale my last.

I think it is important to say that if one is invited to a wedding, one is a date. On a date. Last night I had a date with a man in a salmon colored shirt with french cuffs. We were the lesser attractive version Gisele and Leo and I felt laughably akin to a giraffe for the first time in my life at a few points throughout the night (this was partially due to my new towering patent leather high heels. Sigh). Wonderful, wonderful giraffe sensations. It went swimmingly until that fateful point in the evening where all caution was lost, the bathroom became my best friend and I had to be rescued from a stall by a gaggle of flapping mothers thrown into high gear at the sound of moaning coming from lucky door number two. Unfortunately, lucky door number two was my door. Not so lucky. Rainbow vomit with a side of wild rice and a mutilated salmon filet the same color as my date's shirt and one sagging girl seeing stars in a French Riviera inspired outfit at the Fort Garry hotel. My attempt to look 'yacht chic' was just that, an attempt.

Even so, my spirits were buoyed this morning at work (in spite of feeling like death microwaved on high) by my favorite customer who rushed over at the sight of my slowed body and whispered that the only time she does not suffer from vertigo is when she is talking to me. I looked down at her ninety year old knobby hands with the blue veins and the gnarled fingers weighted down by her Jewish jewels and painted talons and told her flat out that I loved her.

"I love you Margaret; I do".
"I love you too, Megan; I do".

I wished I could have told her that the only time I do not suffer from a hangover is when I am talking to her. But that would have been a lie, so I chose to say the words "I love you" instead.

Sometimes I just need to say it, let the words build up and rip through my body like a mighty rushing wind. Last night before all the puke and the empty nest sydromed mothers and the ride home that no matter how many tries I will never remember, I sat at a table tracing a wine glass with a finger and watched the salmon shirt race around the ballroom with the same agility of a live salmon. A lazy smile crept up and remained. It was one of those moments where you lose yourself, forget everything, noise stops, time stops, everything stops except the people locked inside the stare, inside the moment, and everyone except the person in focus look almost cartoony; time slows and something clicks. Something clicked. I think those are very selfless moments and I do not experience them nearly enough as I should.

A Welsh man named Bruce used to come into Bread and Circuses every morning at nine fifteen for a petit pain au chocolate and an espresso (I think he ordered that to bring Europe closer, I do the same thing). He always favored argyle sweater vests and thick glasses, even in summer. Even if I was up to my ears in porridge and multigrain toast orders I would stop everything just to be able to serve him. One day, he leaned across the counter dividing our bodies and grabbed my flying hands.

"Megan", he said with his delicious Welsh accent "you have a knowing smile". I told him I loved him then too but I never quite knew exactly what it meant to have a 'knowing smile'; until yesterday. Yesterday I knew.

In that instant I aged well beyond my years, and became free in this new understanding. I miss Bruce something fierce, but that knowing smile creeps back and remains whenever I get a post card in the mail from Britain or whenever I imagine him walking along a stone fence in the morning fog with an Airedale as old as he is walking beside those beat Wellies. It is people like the Bruces and the Margarets that remind me to continue to extend grace, exclaim love and sit back and watch someone move around a room as fast as a fish.