by Cathie Beck

Created on: September 02, 2009

Not every defining moment is crystal clear or even noticeable.

It's not always the "high points" - the weddings, the graduations, the births - that makes us sit up and take notice.

Sometimes a "defining moment" comes in the shape of a quiet person, a calm summer's evening, a whisper in the wind.

I lost a dear friend unexpectedly 10 years ago. She was in her 40s and healthy and well and alive. We shared a lot in the years preceding her death, including all the stuff of life: illness, other deaths, our own mortality.

When she died, I was nowhere nearby. I was on the other side of the world.

I learned of her death upon my return. She'd been gone a month and, when her sister called to tell me, she also called to say that she had something from Madison, my friend, that I might want.

It was a wine. A brilliant, wonderful, Australian wine. It was very expensive and I've not a clue why she had it - she did drink.

That wine - now 10 years later - sits among many much lower priced wines - on my wine rack.

I won't let myself drink it. I even have a little sticky pasted to the bottle that says, "don't drink."

It has a lot of dust on it, though even it gets occasionally dusted. In the meantime, I drink around it - selecting the lesser-priced wines when I want to open a bottle.

It is her birthday today. The fireplace guy is cleaning the fireplace for the autumn.

He leans his big tool box up against the wine rack base.

Then he leans against his tool box as he tells me the cost to get the fireplace working.

And all 200 pounds of him, plus his 30 pound toolbox push the wine rack over.

The Australian wine just cleaned and waxed my floor.

I think of all the effort the vintner went into getting the grape, planting the grape, nurturing the grape - then the bottling, the labeling, the producing and the shipping.

I think of who found the money - my deceased friend? - to buy the mysterious Australian wine - and how I feared a guest might accidentally drink it, or that I might drop it or that the dog that runs through my house might knock it over.

I think of all the wasted energy - and the wasted regret of my fireplace guy - in the crashing and the spilling of the expensive beverage.

Then the fireplace guy asks me out and he is cute and his name is the same last night of my deceased friend.

And I think of how strange it all is.

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