A Rubber Ducky Race

Parallel to the water and circus themed boardwalk, east of the body builders and fortune tellers, south of the tanned bodies, and still west of surrounding LA, lays the Venice canals. A small community of cute homes, separated by narrow waterways. I've cut through them, up and over the bridges, to get to the beach, and on a date once I walked hand in hand down one, but generally I don't give a whole lot of thought to them in a city where there's something always shinier grabbing your eye.

In a new Independence Day tradition, children and adults both, line up for the "Rubber Ducky" Race. Children in life jackets, and everyone at one time drops their plastic yellow rubber ducky in the water, and then it's up to the canal, and the wind, and the movement of the universe to carry it forward to the finish line. There can be only one winner in a race. But I've always seen pictures, and seen participation in something so innocent, beautiful, child-like, simple - as reward enough.

My friend Lisa says I'm the "most resilient person she knows." On the day she was to be married, she rewarded my hardworking bridesmaid duties (of drinking a lot and flirting with her groomsmen) with a small, beautiful trinket. A sterling silver mirror, engraved with the three words which sees in me, gets from me. Resilient was listed first.

"I'm tired of being resilient," I once said after a long bout of unemployment and miscellaneous other troubles.

"I know you are, baby."

It didn't make anything any better, but the acknowledgement, the concept that overcoming adversity that started at childhood with alcoholism and domestic violence, may now come easier, but it's all together exhausting.

For reasons I'll never understand, I got laid off from my job Thursday. I wasn't happy in it, but the grief that comes from that sort of loss, most compare to some of the worst pain you experience. I cried and I cried, until that very same friend, with the engraved mirror called me. We had a similar conversation, to perhaps ones we've had in past, where she reaffirmed my ability to overcome this, to be resilient, to gain strength. To be ok.

I was sad. And I was angry. Hurt. Out of control. And confused.
I thought of the rubber duckies.
I thought of the rubber duckies and their painted on faces, and little plastic bodies, being dropped by children in life jackets in to shallow unpredictable waters, and being carried away by life.
I was blocking part of a driveway, and in a red zone, and I couldn't sit there and cry anymore if for no other reason than my eyelashes were stuck together and a meter maid hovered in my rear view mirror.
I capsulised my pain, and my sense of failure, my fear and anxiety, and I imagined it as a rubber duck, floating away.
And asked only that God take care of getting me to the end of the canal.