Wine

Yellowing teeth which stain up daily to bruised-grape after her goblet or two of cabernet, she wears her hair in a short, New York afro, though she is not African American or Jewish, just a Scottish mix raised in the sun and too-tall-for-shade palms of the Simi Valley.

She would claim anything but the vanilla of her freckling white skin and when it comes to wine or the valley girl talk of her classmates, she hit the reject button. In fact she’d gone to New York at eighteen, a single pair of jeans and cowboy boots after her luggage was lost, and written a screen play, very Woody Allen with a Greek man named John. A man she loved because he stuck out even in Hollywood fringe. His father owned a building in Queen’s and so they wrote and laughed and cried in the apartment in only underwear eating grape leaves, spending two weeks a piece on character studies.

He is there to this day rotting away on a mat in front of a burning green Sylvania set complete with radar antennae. Now fat and homebound he skypes her with the lights off to ask for money to save the building from foreclosure, his father suddenly dead a handful of years back and the taxes haven’t been paid since. Apparently, he’d never recovered after having dumped Carrie for the South African beauty who hailed from Israeli money, soon after he’d given the tax dollar to pay her art school debts, she’d sent him the dreaded, Dear John.

Sitting across the rescued hemlock table here in the hinterlands of Oregon, cabernet Carrie who talks nonstop about what-if’s and if-only’s relay’s her entire afternoon session spent with her overweight, not quite Jungian counselor, an MSW and not a paper stamped Zurich, a woman who simply figures a mixed by her box and bottle, blush wine is cute, that it just matches her labradoodle, Sophie, after all, all parts are welcome in the pursuit of spiritual shine!

“Can you believe it!?” she asks while dribbling wine into her lap, her wasted hour another wasted in the telling.

Photo Credit: Brett Jordan/unsplash