You shall call His name
Sea-calmer,
Wine-maker,
Fish-finder,
Friend
Wound-healer,
Truth teller,
Soul seeker
Lamb
Love-walker
Star-hanger
Tear-keeper
Mine
Bread breaker
Kiss-taker
Grave robber
Thine
© Leigh McLeroy 2002
I wasn’t in her life for long, but every day counted. Cara needed a grown-up to help her for a little while – and thankfully, that job was mine.
One morning we met at a local department store to shop before the public arrived. Every year, through the generosity of some special donors, kids like Cara get the opportunity to buy the new clothes they need to begin their school year. She was starting first grade.
As we waited for the other kids to check in, we planned what we might need: new shoes, shorts, jeans, dresses, and shirts – some, she hoped, in pink and purple, and maybe something with “sparkles.”
The “original” Original Pantry in downtown Los Angeles opened in 1924, and has been open ever since. When the first location was vacated in 1950 to make room for a freeway off-ramp, the short order cooks, busboys, waiters and waitresses finished with the lunch crowd, then moved one block east to serve dinner at the “new” location on the corner of South Figueroa and 9th Street, where the Pantry sits today.
Clark Gable was a regular back in the day, and as the story goes, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Lucille Ball once ate there at the same time, although at different tables.
Eighty seven customers can be served at once; that’s 2,000-plus each day. On the morning I stopped in, the cast included three parrot-headed punkers who had probably not yet been to bed, a well-dressed middle-aged couple in a silent stand-off, and a filthy woman at the bar who muttered to herself over the din of dishes.
Timing is huge, isn’t it? In deal-making. Athletics. Cooking. Careers. Politics. Relationships. Medicine. Child-rearing. Truth-telling.
So much of life, it seems, hinges on timing.
I wonder if you can look back today and see well-timed moments that clearly changed your life’s course? Are there for you, as there are for me, moments so profound that life could actually be book marked by them, labeling the events on either side as “before,” or “after?”
I’m thinking of a quiet moment alone on a beach in Amelia Island, Florida, well past midnight. Of one friend’s high school football accident. Of another’s eleventh hour visa to leave communist Romania. And of a kiss that wasn’t supposed to be the last one, but was.