By Ian Hochberg
Among the wreckage from the Titanic, strewn among the hulking remains, were eggs, which withstood the unfathomable deep sea pressure for over a century, still intact.
It was a stormy night as dark as the coldest dream from
Poe’s imagination.
The tempest steamroller that flattened all hopes for a dry and peaceful previous night
revealed an ocean blue morning sky with cotton clouds at dawn.
The clarity of the storm passed and left a wake of confusion about what lay ahead for me.
Stay in business? Do something else? where were all the mighty profits of some years ago? … all before I went to my shop to find I was flooded out.
What that lay ahead was mud and the compounded unknowing of what to do next.
Mandy, a unknown prospect, called a few days after the storm. Could I come by to assist her and spouse Jim with a simple
address sign for their new home? They lived near the shop and were most gracious with good warm humor on my arrival, abetted with compassion for our plight.
There were many clients who stood by us as we bumped into walls, scraped mud and regained ourselves
from the elephantine challenges we faced, mostly in my uncertain heart of step by step mending.
Mandy remained saintly patient as her tiniest of jobs, which she could easily have taken away from us and found solace from online,
waited for a fulfillment that normally may have been completed in several weeks, yet became several months.
FINALLY, the job was done.
and her final words in exclaim were – “I love it. It was worth the wait”.
The eggs, perhaps among the most fragile items on the White Star Liner Titanic,
next to life itself, withstood the duress and stress that iron and man’s greatest dreams could not.
Thank you, Mandy and Jim, for believing in us.