FACELESS FIGURINE

Yesterday an old friend came into town to visit with her daughter, who lives here.  She and her husband and their two children  lived next door to us when we first moved to Ann Arbor.  Her name is Elise .She and Gwen were and continued to be the best of friends.  I guess today they would be called BFF.   Elise and her husband have been living in California for quite some time now.  We had dinner last night; the first course was tears. As she and I reminisced about Gwen it became another of those miraculous moments when, just briefly, Gwen was back with us with her brightest smile.

It's fair to say that Gwen was essentially a practical person.  There was a side to her that loved doing goofy things, as the picture of her in the straw hat clearly shows.  I was always convinced that part of the reason she kept me around was so that she could have her very own goofy thing.  One of the things I found so fascinating about her was that she loved to do the unexpected, as was the case, Christmas, 2009,  when she gave me as a gift a figurine of a man and a woman in love.  I'ts only about eight inches tall; made by a company called Willow Tree.  All the gift stores have them. It's so impractical.  I wrote about it:

FACELESS FIGURINE

She and I were together at the gift store,

she asked me to leave her alone

she’d be fine in her wheelchair.

It was then she bought the

faceless figurine.

I pretended not to know

what was going on.

It was so impractical

 a gift like that figurine,

a man behind a woman

his arms around her waist

her hand on his face

nuzzling each other.

There’s a blank place

where their faces ought to be;

like a Hallmark Card without words.

The love they share

is there for all to see.

I love the faceless figurine,

it’s on my mantel  

with other treasures,

its meaning so clear to her then

 so much more to me now.

She knew,

if the two of them

had faces,

they couldn’t be us,

 it wouldn’t be

our love.

John A. Bayerl, February 6, 2011

Behind the figurine, on the mantel, I  keep a birthday card Gwen gave me three years ago.  On it, she wrote  "John, The love of my life!!  I will miss you terribly someday. . ."  I love that thought of us missing each other.  She has given me so much to hold onto, even now.