Beer with Havel, Part Two

Of course I was not Rachel, nor could I ever hope to be. Her beloved husband Harry- a mild-mannered retired businessman of mini stature and grand manners had been filling the Number Two slot for many years after a brief, disastrous union earlier in her youth. Unfortunately he had a stroke in later life (Harry had at least twenty on Rachel), and as soon as he could stand she began hauling him off to Sunday afternoon tea dances at Windows on the World. He was just ambulatory enough to allow himself to be glided around the snazzy observation deck of a dance floor in the carefree decades before 9/11 and the moment in history was not lost on Rachel. Had I ever had to face a similar situation I probably would have sought out every pop and self help book on the vagaries of destiny and neuroscience I could find and then spent the rest of my energy railing against the unfairness of things. Luckily I was trying to get out of a failing marriage of my own at the time so the idea of healing the infirm through fancy stepping was a kind of a moot point anyway, but still something to tuck away for later should the need arise. It was all about motion for Rachel and in the peacefully catatonic years prior to both the internet and the sudden, ubiquitous onslaught of women tri-athletes, she also proved that movement was indeed life by frequently walking the proverbial three or four miles over hill and dale to her high school English teaching job when the weather “permitted.” Once arrived, she would jar awake the pre-conscious awarenesses of thirty or so sleepy adolescent minds, catapulting them out of their collective swoon by relentlessly peppering them with insanely thought provoking questions about heroes and villains at the intensely thought provoking hour of eight in the morning, or to be more precise, at exactly seventeen minutes after eight when the late bell rang. But her penchant for mobility stopped short of ever letting herself resemble a sweat drenched alley cat of a jogger during her bouts of self-inflicted cardio. You would never catch her in one of those strange, unflattering get-ups for runners and other compulsive exercisers that now serve as familiar badges for the burgeoning movement trade. She had a passion for hip, arty outfits fashioned out of intricately woven fabric that you find only in expensive boutiques and managed to conjure up all sorts of colorful, teeny sized ensembles in the most stylish manner before there was a real selection of petite sized clothing available for petite sized adults, that is, short (no pun) of having to shop in the children’s department; it was still a time when smaller women basically had to make do with endless bouts of alteration lest they wind up with comically long sleeves,  pants legs that dragged, or worse, rolled; however she somehow managed to finesse these ripples without winding up looking like a kid parading around in her mother’s pinned up dresses for Halloween. Her one concession to practicality was the sensible shoes she clomped around in for the many miles of hoofing it. I was still wearing jeans and clogs back then, more than occasionally rolling the cuffs and thinking that exercise was overrated, a fad.

While Rachel was still in her late sixties and seeming older than the hills to a woman not yet forty though already dreading the day, I once asked her if she ever thought about death, and if so, specifically what she thought about it; we were in Bloomingdales and I can still see us standing at one of the many beauty counters splattering and immersing ourselves in all sorts of densely aromatic samples with particularly careless abandon, when the question came up. Skipping barely a half beat, she looked aloft to the recessed lighting that so flattered the mannequins as well as the shoppers and said with certainty that there was no point in thinking about this since she would not be aware of what was going on in the world anyway. This theory of course eventually would lead to the natural conclusion that one must live life as if each day were the last, a thought more unsettling than death itself; but at a less radical level of consideration it still offered food for thought. I had been obsessing about mortality since my first brush with a felled pigeon back in kindergarten, and zillions of hours spent reading novels since had done not much to dispel the thoughts, though it did drastically increase the strength of my lens prescription each year. And although she read far into the night with the best of them and consumed as many words if not more than the geekiest of geeks or most cozily contented and battened down of bookworms-  and not just fiction but non-fiction and biography too- Rachel did not seem to require eyeglasses. Her one anatomical failing, or that which bothered her most intensely about her mortal coil as she called it- a favorite line from the play she loved to teach- centered around her hands and feet- she positively hated her fingers- and this visceral antipathy to her own digits led her to having her hammer toes surgically corrected, though she normally avoided going to doctors even for a checkup. She appeared in school one day after a brief absence wearing those weird, splint-like things that look like snow shoes with bandages and said that if breaking a few bones meant she could  finally look good in sandals- a lifelong dream apparently- then it was well worth it. Was she vain? Not in the usual way; she had lots of wrinkles and wore her completely gray hair cut short and uncomplicatedly, in a style befitting the most mythical of chocolate-chip-cookie-baking grannies from the Midwest; it was all about the earrings, naturally. That, and the slightly Brooklyn accent. . . .