where isn’t it

I’ve been looking for a larger rug than the two small twins I bought a couple of Saturdays ago. I tracked one down – 10 x 10 – my offer of $40 was accepted because the guy’s moving Friday and it has to go. But I did not go for this rug yesterday, no, I made a plan to meet a young woman selling a hand-painted small table for $20 in a Fred Meyer parking lot over in Northeast, my suggestion, and she showed with her beau and he tossed it in the Camry’s trunk and I said maybe we can have coffee sometime and they said sweet and off they went. I stayed and looked at FB Marketplace on my phone, and the rug guy had messaged with his address which was nearly around the corner. Bang!

So I messaged I’m like right here, brah, and I drove over and could not find the address and parked and messaged a couple of times saying I was going to head home, and as I was driving away saw it (his address)and swung around and knocked on the door and just then my phone rang and it was him and he said he was on the way home and apologized five times for leading me to think he was there. And you know what? It’s just fine, I said. I’ll wait, I said, and you have nothing to apologize about. The world needs kindness and compassion and patience, right? So I sat in my car and he showed up and I said a few words and he said, “You’re for sure from Massachusetts,” which was kind of wondrous, him being born in Boston and everything.

So we went into his place, boxes and stuff everywhere hauntingly familiar, and he said the rug was likely way too big for my car – and it absolutely was. You don’t have to buy it, he said, and I’m sorry I said because I said I would and he’s got a deadline. And he said, well, I have a smaller one I need to get rid of too, in fact, he said, the non-carpeted room in his new place would probably work for the big one, so he pulled the rug you saw and see up there in the picture out from under a bed and vacuumed it with this crazy, science-fiction-like vaccum, and carried it out to my car and tossed it in and when I got home here to the attic I placed it lovingly on the floor and took the picture above and sent it to him, with endless thanks. He had offered to give it to me free, I gave him a twenty.

He’s now a contact, Bryn, my first new person, and our plan to get a coffee feels when, not maybe.

I was talking with Gina yesterday about wonder and magic as they relate to the Rhododendron Garden. But, man, I go through the day, through the world, with my eyes and my ears and my heart wide open, and where isn’t it! As the God Indra said to the Buddha, “The temple is erected.”

It’s right here.