Wait For It

        Rob Thomas’s cover of “Blood and Fire” is nothing short of breathtaking - best listened to on the way to work, when dawn is just the tiniest strip of pink on the horizon. Funny thing about this tune, though – it is not immediately fantastic. It’s live, and the sound quality is poor, the opening measures filled with squawk and back feed. But then, at last, Rob Thomas open his mouth and the notes fall out; I swear to you, the first time I heard this it stopped me in my tracks. That voice flows; it soars. It reaches right into you and snags a piece of your soul, and you know, right then, that you have heard something absolutely lovely.

            You just have to wait for it.

            A birthday, and I’m in the kitchen getting the cake ready. Three candles, or ten, or twenty – doesn’t matter. I light them and carry the cake into the dining room, and watch. There it is, the smile. More spectacular with each passing year, because I can see the little child, first peeking out through the adolescent’s eyes, and then the adult’s - and I realize that essentially nothing changes. This wonderful person is still my child and always will be, and the smile – well, the smile has the power to set my world right.

            I just have to wait for it.   

            There are evenings when I feel as though my soul is bruised. As though nothing I do could ever be good or right; and even though the last patient called us angels I know that her hip is broken and essentially her life is beginning a sharp decline here, today. The best way, of course, to deal with that knowledge is to shove it aside, and by and large, I am successful at that, but sometimes – well, sometimes I feel that it makes me a lesser person to bleed for other people; it costs too much.

So I’m on my way home in this wretched, bad funk, and I just want to choke somebody. But then – wait for it, wait for it – the angle of the setting sun changes and all of this filthy, tiresome March snow is bathed in a perfect lavender light. Norah Jones is singing “The Long Day is Over” on my radio, and a peace – a tranquility so clear and sharp it is nine tenths painful – comes over me and I know that I am going to be okay.

There are moments in our lives of sheer beauty. Quiet moments so quick we can miss them if we’re not looking for them – sweet, evocative notes and birthday candles and twilight shadows on snow.

Wait for it, wait for it.

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