Every Color in the Box
Three days before Christmas, I was standing in my kitchen looking at the center island that needed cleaning when my phone vibrated. I rarely pick up and even more rarely receive calls from anyone besides the kids' schools' administrators or spurious businesses on the East Coast. But that afternoon, when I glanced at the number, I actually responded. Then I went to my car to chat in quiet – Christmas equals busy house -- and spent forty minutes catching up with a college girlfriend, Corinna, whom I hadn't spoken with in two years. No, she hadn't butt dialed me (I asked). She sincerely wanted to know how my family and I were doing. I love talking to Corinna – after 20 years, we still laugh at the same dorky, perhaps lame, jokes and can discuss everything from health care to education to all sorts of -isms. That day, conversation flowed easily from family to jobs to aspirations before she had one more story to tell, an otherwise benign anecdote that truly made me s