A few years ago we started the game of trying to think of the quintessential story of a person. Like, if you had to explain the essence of someone in one story, this is the one you would tell. I thought it would be fun to get some of them down.
* Rachel *
There was a heavenly year when we lived in Atlanta that Rachel lived with us. She was the perfect housemate: quiet, considerate, tidy. She was working for the CDC, and every morning she would slip out the door like a whisper. I never heard the shower run or her packing up her bag, and I was always mystified when I realized that she'd already left. It was a masterclass in being unobtrusive.
One morning, though, I happened to be down at the dining room table, which had a partial view into the galley kitchen. I saw Rachel slip into the room, the light a gentle early morning grey. The whole time she'd been living with us we had generally managed our groceries separately. We ate dinner together, but other food and snacks were kind of separate. On that particular morning, there was a gorgeous bunch of bananas on the counter, practically glowing in the flat dawn light. Rachel had purchased them the day before, and now she broke one of them off of the bunch, put it into her lunch bag, and was headed out the door when I saw her come to an abrupt halt. "What's she looking at?" I wondered. What she was looking at was a nasty brown banana that I had purchased the week before. It was sitting it the fruitbowl like some kind of garden slug. Slooowly, Rachel pulled the perfect banana back out of her bag, and looked at it for awhile. Then, with the determination of a person who has seen the hard road that must be walked, she put her perfect banana in the bowl, picked up the brown one, and headed out into her day. That is Rachel. The kind of a person who would never eat a perfect banana if others had to suffer with less. Also who would never let food go to waste if she had anything to say about it.
The only thing that would make that story a better description of my sister Rachel is if it included some glimpse of the inner steel that appears in the face of a challenge. If she'd beaten me in a race to the banana, that would be a perfect story.
