let it ring a little longer

It was 11:15 Wednesday morning and I was sitting at a hospital cafeteria table with the three folks for whom I’ve served as ‘job coach’ about the last four months. Two were eating lunch, one wasn’t, nobody was talking. I’d had two vaccinations the previous afternoon – Covid booster and RSV – and I was pretty wiped out. A short time earlier I’d called the two young men to the table to tell them it had been my pleasure to work with them, I was grateful to meet them. I reminded them that should they need a reference or just a life update they had my phone number, which, back in the thick of my human service days would have been something of a boundary violation, but since my personal 70 has come and long gone, rules strike me more as ‘guidelines’ than hard and fast.

I will follow the rules when I drive the 5 and the 405 and the 101 into San Luis Obispo a week from Sunday. Beyond that, who knows? Even guidelines feel like quite a stretch these days.