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Metaphors. Ya hear em all the time. My friend( we shall call her Nancy),  is a walking talking metaphor spouting female. Sometimes I'm left behind in conversation with her as I try to decipher what she is really trying to tell me. It's an all day work out just keeping full stride in her stories. I continue to work on it. Just the other day we rekindled a conversation we started a year ago.  It went something like this and she thought I was all caught up now on a mutual friend who will be known as "the side dish". I'm still digesting, regurgitating and chewing again. I'm relaying this story.


 Married and settled into his family, he awoke each morning and prepared for his day. He blew a kiss to his wife over the  tops of the varying heights of heads surrounding the table. It was his responsibility to provide the financial support.
 His was a job he enjoyed, while hers was care of their children which she enjoyed most of the time. Neither could agree on who had the most stressful assignment. He battled corporate giants while she nurtured those future giants. Both jobs required skill in negotiations and treading a mine field of egos.

Time marches on and  changes dipped and swirled around their lives. The children grew, quickly, it seemed to him and not so quickly to her. The usual battles with his job and hers as they both navigated the paths of their lives,  intersecting at 1700 hrs and on the weekends.

His family was the most important thing in his life. His dedicated and loving wife, a stalwart pillar of support to him all these long years, she remained the key stone of the family.

By accident a side dish nudged into the stream of their lives   and shared the water with them. Unknown to the wife, this side dish bobbed along on the fringes of this family until one day, she made a decision. Bobbing along was not in her nature. Being a side dish wasn't either.

My friend watched from a distance without judgement. Not one to cast the first stone, Nancy was busy bobbing down her own stream. Occasionally the side dish would appear at her doorstep and entering the house and over a cup of coffee, she would entertain my friend with the stream she was navigating at the moment. My friend noted the changes in her each time she visited. The side dish's  attention was beginning to wan, her interests directed into unexplored areas. This side dish would allow a small amount of distraction into her life for a short time, but knowing her as Nancy did, her boat would right itself and she would sail on alone.

Time again sprang forward some 10 years and again the side dish and Nancy crossed paths or maybe I should say "streams" and she was no longer a side dish.

Nancy flashed back to the last time they had talked and discreetly decided to not initiate a conversation on side dishes. Lesson learned, she doesn't repeat the same mistake twice. She was the entree now and enjoying her life tremendously. Being a salad can't compare to being the entree but being a side dish is totally unacceptable. Her metaphor, not mine.

Lunch anyone?