NOTHING SPECIAL: HEAVEN AND EARTH

They’d been spending a quiet afternoon by the pool. Nothing special. Bette had been working on her lecture, taking it from outline to mostly complete. She’d been invited to speak before the Art Students’ League in New York, the topic being the depiction of the arts in art. The segment on Degas was done, tight and polished to a high sheen. If she could, Bette wanted every paragraph to be like a precisely cut gem, placed together with the rest to make the lecture as a whole like a carefully crafted piece of jewelry that reflected light and knowledge. She never really spoke about it to others, but Bette was proud of her speeches and her writing. Conveying her thoughts and opinions in a coherent and meaningful fashion to others, the better to bring her appreciation of the arts to a wider audience was her mission, something that went well beyond the usual meaning of a job. A most satisfying exercise, but the required concentation was tiring. She looked up from her laptop to regard her companion.

Tina had been spending her time not writing, but reading. She’d been shifting through a rather deep stack of papers. Proposals for a wide variety of social programs, budgets and the like. She too had great passion for her work and found tremendous reward in the help delivered through her efforts to those in real need, but this phase of the work was stressful to her. The budgets, while something she grasped with out effort, were extremely dry reading and nearly every proposal was for a worthy cause. It was difficult to decide what to back and to what degree. She herself had limited resources and to allocate them properly she sometimes felt she would need to be God. She didn’t feel like God. What she did feel was that wordless awareness that she was being watched. Automatically she looked over to find Bette’s eyes trained on her.

Bette, having been caught, smiled bashfully at her. She too had been in automatic mode. "Sorry, Babe. I didn’t mean to stare."

Tina chuckled softly. "Well, I suppose I can get over it. This time." With the light fading in the backyard she tidied the papers back into their original orderly stack and got up from the deck chair, stretching. She walked over to Bette, who remembered to save her document before setting the laptop aside. Tina extended her hand. "Care for a dip?"