Divorce Cake

No, it wasn't my birthday. It's my divorce cake! Hooray! Of the guests in attendance, it didn't leave a bad taste in anyone's mouth.

A Tree Grows in Officeland

The Weed Tree, Westville, New Jersey in 2011

The first time I met Milroy Lee, a high functioning gregarious developmentally disabled client, we were crossing paths outside my satelite office...Since it was a hot day, we decided to chat underneath the comfort of a shade tree where an arbor used to similarly sun shield a wooden picnic table. Milroy asked me how long I have been working for my particular agency as a social worker. With the arbor gone, I tried to equate tenure with our immediate environment.

I answered, "I've been working here since before this tree was here that we are standing under. It used to be a sapling that Crew Labor clients forgot to mow..I almost hanked it out of the ground one day but thought better of it. Eventually, it got big enough that nobody bothered to mow it down. It stands here wondrous now casting welcome shade, kind of like we are..here by both design and by happenstance....like accidental intention....Do you understand me, Milroy?"

He grasped what I was saying in his own world. "Yeah, like how your co-worker transferred me to you. She had a plan to bring us together. She thought I needed a male case manager."

A friendship grew as a decade passed. I learned of Milroy's death at work on the telephone from another stuttering disabled client whose only clarity included the unbelievable sentence, "Milroy Lee is dead!"

Startled and stung, I hung up the phone and ran out of the building short of breath to the point of hyperventilating. I stopped by that same tree....I thought of that first conversation I had with Milroy here underneath the tree. The ironic madness made me cry...knowing Milroy was killed accidentally as a pedestrian on this same damn street and now only me and the tree were left by accidental intention. Milroy was gone.