Looking Out the Window at the Starbucks on 8th Street

I am quite sure I am not the only one struck by a stranger's similarities to someone we have known and miss. Sometimes the resemblance is so uncanny, it takes great restraint not to approach what is right before your eyes. A chance glance was quite eery:

 

A cupie doll brunette with Jackie Kennedy dark glasses

catches my eye

She looks like my long dead cousin Christy,
 who succumbed to stomach cancer many years ago…
my cousin Christy, who decided to get married on my 20^th birthday and although we had always been close, let her mother persuade her not to let me be a brides maid because I was no longer a practicing Catholic…
my cousin Christy who took me and my daughter in for six weeks the summer I was divorcing…

My cousin Christy, who made us attend church while we

were in her household, but protested most adamantly

when my eight year old wanted to take communion

with her cousins

My cousin Christy, who bought us matching barrettes to

get the hair off our necks on a hot summer day…
my cousin Christy, who engineered, single-handedly, a camping trip to a state park because apparently she felt compelled to treat us like guests and entertain us…
my cousin Christy who cooked the best zucchini and onions smothered in melted chewy gooey parmesan that I had ever eaten…my cousin Christy, who had rheumatic fever as a child and they feared it would shorten her life

my cousin Christy died at 52…

There is a woman not twenty feet from me who is a dead ringer for my cousin Christy,
 who’s been in the grave a good decade

How can that be? I wonder…and the doppelganger is sipping a pink drink, too! 
That is so Christy!

I resist for all I am worth, the urge to ask the woman her name

That would be just too weird…
         As I watch the cousin Christy lookalike walk away,
 I feel a certain warm flush and think, 
perhaps Christy noticed  her, too…

Spring 2011

RMK