Unwelcome Display

People are strange. I work in Customer Service and should know. Just when I think I've seen it all, I'll meet a new person or receive a phone call and I laugh. WOW! I thought I had seen it all.

My friend is a teacher and she told me this story,

One of my students stopped coming to school when he turned 18. He didn't call or let the school know, he just stopped coming. His mother came by. We were talking about her son. While talking she began to pull medication bottles out of her purse and line them up on the edge of my desk. She had quite a few and after lining them up, with no transition in the conversation she began to talk about them.

"This is the one I use for..." She went down the line and described them one by one.
"This one doesn't work..."
"This is the one I use when my son is stressing me out. Sometimes I need to take two."

As she neared the end of the medication line-up, she again suddenly switched topics and began telling me about her hernia. Before I could fully grasp what was happening, she was lifting the side of her shirt to show it to me.

"Really," I thought, shaking my head, I couldn't believe she was showing me her hernia. "Why are you showing me this?" I thought. If I had a hernia I certainly wouldn't be showing people. My Grandpa had one and he did the same thing. Seriously though, why would you show someone? If I had a hernia, I would hide it from everyone.

Blue Butterlies

I sat at Starbucks gazing out the window, waiting for my friend. She had gone to the wrong Starbucks on accident and was on her way. I watched a man walk across the parking lot. Tall. Slim. Old. Black leather Harley Davidson jacket over a T-shirt. I looked away. Ten minutes later he sat in the empty seat across from me and began to talk.

You know the world is ending, right?
I didn't answer, but just looked at him.
It's going to end in 2012.
I tried to follow all he said, but he was speaking softly and I couldn't find the thread to follow to untangle the meaning of all his words.
You don't need to worry about the end of the world. It all just begins again.
I asked him what his belief background was.
I'm Buddhist. I reached Zen once. You know that state of nothing and yet of being. Once you reach that state you no longer have to come back. When I reached Zen, I was under a large pile of leaves and when I pushed through them, there were two blue butterflies flying above my face. They were large and their wings looked like eyes.
Another time I saw my previous 23 lives. I was a Buddhist monk...

My friend arrived just as his coffee was ready. He got up to get it, my friend sat down. He said goodbye and walked out the door.

Over the next days I thought of blue butterflies and while I am not a Buddhist, I would have liked to see them.

Sidenote: When I told this story to my friend Kate, she laughed because she had met this man at a different Starbucks and knew exactly who I was talking about.