sorry.
I'm sooooooo sorry.
whoa - sorry!
and my daughter's favorite - SAH-REE! (flip your shoulders and squiggle your eyebrows together)
This week was a "Sorry" week. You know it'll be a doozy when you start off on Monday morning with a 'sorry I burned your toast' AND a 'sorry there's no clean socks' AND a 'No, sorry, you can't dance on the table with the bread knife and the mustard spoon'.
So 'sorry' comes freely and truthfully to my tongue, and looking back on the last few days I see that I used it quite often. But it's also a feeling, a sense of let-down-ness, of 'ugck' in the pit of one's stomach, or a pause in one's breath.
I called a friend on Thursday evening, just for a chat. Her husband answered the phone and, to my "hey Kosta, how's it goin?" he answered that one of their friends, the godfather of their youngest daughter,
had died that morning.
He was 35. A fisherman, pretty fit, active, a really nice guy. He came home from the boat as usual, kissed his wife and kids, and went to bed. But never woke up.
"I am SO sorry" is nothing in the wake of such news, but it was the only thing I had to offer. I have thought of the family all week, with a catch in my throat and an 'ungck' in my stomach.
Last weekend another friend lost her father, and had to fly to Germany one day too late to see him.
And of course the riots (here and in Athens) have been on our minds all week, truly
a sorry state of affairs.
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I look up sorry in the online dictionary and the usual meanings are displayed: sad, mournful, expressing regret, a bad state of being. Those references all take me to "source materials." Hoping for some insightful quotation or archaic philosophical clue, I click -
and the Amazon website comes up with about 500 books on word origins.
Commerce, one is relieved to know, will always find a way.
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Just now I got off the phone with my friend. After a long day of post-funeral coffee making and cake-serving she managed to get back to her own family just in time for her angry relatives (they had been watching the kids) to scream about why she was so late and how they'd never make it back home on time now with the rain and all.
I hope she just looked at them, and didn't say sorry.