A Life Touched

I went out the other night to meet my friend Bridget for a glass of wine before she had dinner with her husband. We met up the road at Carmel Valley Ranch, a golf course and resort type setting where they were having their weekly members night. It is a beautiful place and most often there are familiar faces there. I was glad it would be an early night, just a brief time out as I had been busy and home sounded nice.

As I was putting my jacket on and saying my good-bye after our visit, an older couple walked in that I have known for awhile. I had met them when I worked in a restaurant in Carmel and have kept loosely in touch ever since. They took me out to dinner after Kenny passed away which was very sweet and thoughtful of them and very much appreciated. They are always at Carmel's hot spot every Friday night and tell me to come out anytime, join them for dinner or a drink.... they will be there. They seem to love everyone.....they are those kind of people.

So my jacket came back off and I joined them for what I thought would be a short visit. Their friend Jim came in, a hairdresser in Carmel which I had met before, and then Jim's son Desi and his girlfriend Jessica. And so we were six, standing, sitting, mingling amongst ourselves and talking about all kinds of things. When I was introducing myself to Jessica, the first thing she said was that I looked so familiar to her. "No....sorry...but you don't look familiar to me" I said back but wished I could have said she looked familiar too. So after a lot of chit chat and a hearty invitation to join them all in Mount Shasta for Thanksgiving, I found myself sitting next to Jessica, sharing a caprese salad and telling her about Kenny. And then it clicked for her. She now knew why my face looked so very familiar to her. She told me that she had been in a very bad relationship with a guy for over three years. He battled with depression and she was alway trying to "help". She walked on eggshells and always tried to be upbeat and happy in order to draw him from his funk. One day, she came across the magazine, "65 Degrees", which is a local magazine that had written an article about Kenny and all he was going through. My picture was in it too, so that is where she had seen me before. When she read the article about Kenny, about us, and the kind of love we shared, something in her clicked. She knew that what we had was what she wanted and she needed to move on from this mismatched relationship she had found herself in. "You don't know how many times I read that article" she told me. "I knew I wanted that kind of love too". And so it was the article, the story of Kenny, and the story of our love, that gave her the courage to move on.

We basically closed the place down and I left that evening feeling alive and full. Kenny and I, and the love we had for each other, had touched a life. We had made a difference in someone else....someone young and beautiful and someone who still had her whole life ahead of her. And hopefully sweet Jessica will choose well.... she will find that love she yearns for.....and she will enjoy it every day that it is given to her. I yearned for it.....I found it....and it is still mine.....and however I can, I still enjoy.