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A smile gently tugged at the corners of my lips and then rippled upward to my eyes. Nothing in the words I heard amused me, though. It was actually the irony of them that made me feel oddly safer.
Moments before the meeting began, I had become interminably “un-found.” To say I was “lost” wouldn’t have summed up the deepness of my altered state. I was unsettled, adrift, and then, it dawned on me:
“This is what being distraught must feel like,” I whispered.
Listening politely, the Irish guy was telling me in too much detail about his program called “Night Lodging.” I agreed that providing rooms for St. Petersburg, Russia’s homeless was a greatly needed service.
Just moments before he arrived, my step-father had called from the US:
“She’s gone, Brian. Your mother has passed.”
Zzzzinnnngg-zingg, the shrill Soviet-made doorbell sounded, denying me even a second to digest the news.
Staring straight-forward, I felt like I was hovering above the ancient arc-sized table like an out-of-place soul from a Chagall painting. The taut tether, growing ever slacker with each passing year for nearly thirty of them, had suddenly been severed…
