 |
The Right Answer by Sharon deLaubenfels  |
"If you could have dinner with anyone in the world, alive or dead, who would it be?" My husband and I were on our nightly walk with our cocker spaniel, Spike. It is a leisurely walk, partly because we talk about our day, or the neighbor's scraggly lilac bush, or about another neighbor's brick wall lining his front walk and how it is all wrong for the space. But it is also an unhurried walk because Spike makes, on average, 10 stops in 10 minutes of the walk, either to sniff a bush or to "make his mark" on it. Somehow this evening, I managed to successfully slip in my "dinner guest" question--a real coup--since my husband generally dislikes those kinds of games, but this time he didn't dismiss the question. I had my smug reply ready for when he returned the question: "Anton Chekhov; I don't think it could get much better than that," I was going to say. I expected his answer to be "Albert Einstein," or "Bob Dylan," or "William Shakespeare," someone totally cerebral, a groundbreaker, a genius. I wasn't ready for his answer. But when it came, I was envious; why didn’t I think of an answer like that? It seemed so obvious, so right. And I never felt closer to him. She had passed away 16 years ago; and how much he missed her. Without hesitating, he said, "My mother." |
