Jean
When things were very dark a few years ago.
When I was tangled in an giant web of knotty despair and bleakness.
When I was alone one evening, gently rocking in a corner of the kitchenette and weeping until I thought I might accidentally drown the weird cat with my tears.
I rang the emergency number from my GP's surgery.
A lady answered.
I explained my predicament.
My fears for the weird cat.
That I wasn't entirely sure that I should strictly be living anymore, and I thought, at that moment, that maybe a doctor would be a good person to talk to.
The lady.
She was an introductory type person.
The person you tell what is wrong to and then she directs your call.
("Mad! I'm sure of it! Straight to the loony-bonkers dealer-withs!")
Anyway.
The lady.
I shall call her Jean.
(She sounded like a Jean.)
Jean.
I think she might have had short, curly, sandy-blonde hair.
She was about 45.
About.
Jean said to me a thing.
And whenever I accidentally get tangled in the knotty web and the big spider of doom is approaching, I think of the thing Jean said.
"Life is a great commodity."
(She had a slightly cockney accent.)
(And sounded like she smoked between twenty and thirty cigarettes a day.)
I have been mulling over Jean's assertion during the past week.
I think that largely, she is right.
And I am glad that one dark, weepy, hopeless evening, Jean was my receptionist.
7 comments:
Bless the Jeans of the world, they really do know their stuff.
It's good to have a phrase like that to remember when you need it.
Hope you're doing ok.
"Life is a great commodity" ... HHHHmmmmmm
Well mine certainly is, thank you. But sometimes that little grandiosity - that we matter in a huge vast enormous universe - can be undermined.
Undermined callously by others who treat life as cheap.
Undermined by the appalling randomness of the universe.
Like the Deputy Mayor of New Delhi killed by the monkeys he was trying to get off this balcony (they pushed him off - there aren't a sudden new breed of killer monkeys on the loose).
Or the tragic death of a girl yesterday, randomly killed by a wall falling because of a gas explosion.
I like to think that things in my life have meaning. That "everything happens for a reason". But some things just don't, and it rocks my confidence. So I can find it hard to keep hold of that sense of specialness.
Luckily, I'm naturally a "glass is half full" kind of a guy. So usually I feel, yeah, "Life is a great commodity"!
Bobo - I think what touched me was less the content and more that when faced with a sobbing and suicidal girly on the phone, she dug into herself and came up with something. And something human. Which helped. And it's the memory of someone trying to help that, well, helps.
It's nice to know you can dial a number and find someone with a very good understanding of people on the other end. You don't seem to find them very often on the streets.
Hope things are going okay on your end of the line darling.
It's the Jeans of this world that stop the rest of us from going over the edge. More power to them.
These Jeans do sound awflly cool, but it has just occurred to me that I have never actually met anyone with that name...do they actually exist?
Maybe it was a Joanne? Or Joan?
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