"CHOICES" Chapter III

Welcome Visitor and, hopefully, Reader. Please enjoy Chapter III and pass the experience along to your friends. Thanks, see you next time.

III. Tayresa

Tayresa Wellington held Jason’s letter to her breast for a moment, caressing it as if it were Jason himself.

“Sweet man, she thought,” if I leave this play, if I abandon this income how can we be together in San Francisco or anywhere? Don’t you know, like everyone, we must pay the Piper?”

Slowly she folded Jason’s letter and placed it, with the others, in a small wooden box on her dresser. She quickly resumed her makeup routine but couldn’t help thinking of Jason, San Francisco, Golden Gate Park and the Greenies. Especially the Greenies, with whom she had no personal experience and hadn’t even thought about until now.

Routine kept her walking along the back hall to the Green room and the evening’s performance. Certainly it was not enthusiasm nor was it professionalism, just habit---- habit and routine.

We do it without much thought. We do it all day, every day. Make choices I mean. ( did you think I meant something else? ) We feel most are inconsequential and virtually meaningless. We only assign meaning and consequence to those choices which tend to be, as we like to say, life changing; marriage, career, medical treatment, military service. You get the idea. It is as if small choices like eating chocolate ice cream instead of vanilla or going to the market at 5 o'clock instead of 5:30 or writing a check with blue ink instead of black or making a left turn instead of a right are somehow outside the realm of the one inescapable law of the universe, Cause and Effect. Well they aren't. Everything we do, every choice we make causes ripples and bumps in our personal timeline and in all the intersecting timelines we meet along the way. It's just that we don't think about it much. Have you never had an experience that made you say to yourself, " Damn if I had only left home a minute later I wouldn't have been on this stretch of road just when that poor dog decided to cross and I wouldn't have hit him", or something very similar? Of course you have. Yes I admit the scene just sited is a little dramatic but illustrates the point. The fact is our lives are a tapestry of tiny and finely woven choices, the grand design of which may only be discerned at a distance. Simply put we aren't very deliberate. That is to say most of us aren't.

Tayresa Wellington was the most deliberate acting person on planet Earth. She just couldn't do anything without thinking about it first. Thinking it to death Jason would say. In fact he ragged on her about it.

" Dang Tay can you spell spontaneity?", he liked to say. But he would follow with the sweet little smile only he could make and she would smile back, but in her heart it was bothersome and even hurtful. And so, after reading Jason's latest letter she decided to change,

Leave the theater turn right, walk three blocks and open the door to Nickies. What Tayresa did every day at lunch time. She did so because, after a little research and discussion with fellow cast members, she found Nickies to be a pleasant place with good food and newly found good friends.

"Well, Tayresa thought, today will be different. Today I'm awash with spontaneity. Goodbye Nickies, Hello something yet to be discovered."

Tayresa left the theater, turned left and started walking into something new.

"I hope this will be a grand and great adventure", she thought.

To Be Continued

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