Romantic Lunch ... Sidewalk Cafe'

“If you could wave a magic wand toward Ontario from Florida and grant my fondest wish… I would wish for a romantic lunch at a sidewalk café… with you.”

These were her words to me over the telephone. We knew each other in only a strict business relationship. We had met in person on the one occasion that brought her and her husband to my city on holiday. They had come by my office in response to my offer of hospitality when she told me (in the course of our routine business transactions over the phone) that they would be in our area for their vacation.

I was so smitten with her grace and beauty that I locked an ironclad focus on her husband during the entirety of their visit. I knew that my overwhelming attraction to her would be unavoidably obvious to him if I allowed even the briefest of glances in her direction. The thirty minutes of their stay was excruciating. Upon her return to her post as a contact person between my office and the Head Office of our employing company, no mention was ever made of her visit.

Then, after the passing of several weeks with no reason for contact, I phoned the Head Office in Ontario to resolve a technical problem. I did not notice, when I placed the call, that it was the noon-hour when the majority of staff could be expected to be taking their lunch break. After she answered her phone I apologized for the inconsiderate timing of my call and offered to call back at a more convenient time. Whereupon she insisted that I stay on the line with the statement “No… please continue with this call… I haven’t any special plans for lunch today.” My response (hoping to demonstrate my appreciation for the generosity of her personal time given) was “If it were in my power, and if I had a magic wand with which to accomplish it, what special ‘lunch-wish’ could I grant you?” Then came her aforementioned reply.

I telephoned her later that afternoon (after scooping the scattered elements of my emotions into some semblance of order) and said “Please know that I live my life with the major part of me sealed in a vacuum. I must ask that you not toy with the seal on that vacuum lest you be pulled into something that is far more powerful than anything that you might want to deal with.” This was the first time in my life that I had ever attempted verbalizing something that I was acutely aware of but had no definition for. She then indicated her desire to remove the ‘seal.’

Herein lies the importance of this story for you, Dear Reader; you, I, we all have unexpressed; yet vividly real feelings and convictions lying deep within the core of ourselves. These are far too frequently pushed aside, discounted, ignored, and even rejected outright because we have not created a forum for the healthy consideration and honoring of them. I had not been introduced to the understandings available through “temperament” or “personality styles.” I had yet to be introduced to myself by the words of David Keirsey in his Please Understand Me II;

“Idealists are looking for more than life partners in their mates… they want soul partners, persons with whom they can bond in some special spiritual sense, sharing their complex inner lives and communicating intimately about what most concerns them: their feelings and their causes, their romantic fantasies and their ethical dilemmas, their inner division and their search for wholeness.”

And here I was, for the first time in my life, verbalizing, in the only terms with which I was able, the most powerful force at the most central part of me. And I knew that the person who brought this recognition to the surface of my awareness was the single person in my world with whom I could be totally honest and unabashedly candid in the exposure of this aspect of Me. What a moment!


Note: This is an abbreviated excerpt from Chapter 5 of a book in progress.