At the still point of the turning world

James and I are coffee drinkers but not really coffee drinkers. We have one of those tiny 4 cup coffee makers (4 measuring cups not 4 mugs) and we often don't even drink all of the coffee in the pot. When we don't finish the pot, we usually put the leftover in a cup in the fridge to have iced later. Our fridge is particularly cold so there is often a film of ice over the cup by the time you pull it out so you just add some cream and enjoy.

This weekend I opened the fridge, picked up the mug with the coffee dregs and did one of those close the fridge door with your hip moves and must have gained some momentum before hip hit door because the fridge closed with high velocity knocking the mug out of my hand onto the floor, shattering it into too many pieces to repair. I said,"that really sucks" after it hit the floor because it was a great mug, heavy and sturdy and nicely shaped. In fact, we have a number of mugs that match our dishes and hardly ever get used but this mug gets rinsed out nearly every day--it doesn't even make it to the dishwasher because it can't be spared that long.

It's also great because I stole it from the house of some close friends back in New Jersey, the Furlers and it commemorates the 10th anniversary of the church that my family helped plant when I was in junior high. So every morning my coffee or tea or oatmeal cools in this nicely shaped mug that reminds me of these friends and this church. It's like the t-shirt you have from summer camp that's faded and thinned to a lovely consistency that makes it infinitely better than any other t-shirt you own.

James was standing in the doorway of the kitchen as the mug broke and immediately started picking up pieces, pulling the trash can out and sopping up the spilled coffee with an old towel so that I wouldn't track through it with my bare feet. And he said, "I'm sorry honey" because he knew it was more than a mug.

I moped around the kitchen making Finny a plate of food to tide him over until dinner and James walked over to pick up my cell phone from the coffee table. Halfway through his first sentence, I realized he was talking to Al Furler, claiming that he broke my mug and wondering if they could send us another. Al, not being sentimental in the least, passed the phone off to Sue, also not very sentimental because she said half jokingly, "tell Katie, it's only a thing; get over it" but told James she would see what she could do about the mug.

I stood dumbstruck looking through the kitchen to the dining room where James paced, talking on the phone and when he hung up, I walked around the counter, put my arms around his neck and said, "I think that is quite possibly the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me." And I think it was. Not that James isn't a thoughtful person normally or that people haven't done kind things for me but our life, James' and mine, made this act beautiful and loving because he knew the context of the mug both in nostalgic and daily meaning without me actually referring to either. And he knew that it sucked that the mug was broken. We have this ever growing pool of shared information that usually just goes unacknowledged but this Saturday, he saw something simple that made me sad and knew exactly why it made me sad and saw a way to make it better. And I love him for it. And I love the way his life and mine and now our boys' life all overlap and inform the others, like venn diagrams, making it a more delicate and a more poignant process to love each other-knowing what we know.