I met my Business Advisor this morning. He’s one of those people who makes you feel better, which is probably why he’s so good at his job. He’s also that lovely thing, a man who really likes women, something he attributes to being brought up in a household full of them. He is silver-haired and charming and always immaculately turned out.
We have become friends over a series of discussions about my new creative business and I owe him a great deal. He ‘gets’ the business; he ‘gets’ me.
I can’t remember how we came to the moment in conversation, but suddenly, flowing on from where we were, he said My daughter was recently diagnosed with MS. I looked at him aghast and told him how sorry I was.
No, well, people know I don’t talk about it, he said, and then proceeded to tell me all about it, which I took as a token of the trust we have built over the past months.
It turns out his daughter is thirty-four, feisty and intelligent, with a husband and two young children. Life certainly does get the order of things mixed up sometimes.
My Business Advisor, who is unerringly positive about most things (and if he can’t be positive, is pragmatic), ended the conversation with But hey, you know, nobody’s died… though there was nothing flippant about it.
One night, he told me, his daughter telephoned in the middle of the night. Something was wrong, something to do with the disease. He sent them to the hospital and he and his wife went over to baby-sit his daughter’s children. The youngest woke moments after his parents had left the house. My B.A. picked him up and brought him downstairs and rocked him and within seconds the boy was fast asleep on his shoulder. My B.A. then fell asleep himself, right there on the sofa. He awoke an hour later with a stiff back and a numb arm where the small child slept. He uses his arms to describe exactly where the child's head is in relation to his when he woke, and lights with the joy of this moment with his tiny grandson.
Soon after this we are discussing my business venture, and he is on the ‘phone on my behalf, making things happen.
All day his family saga has remained with me. All day I thank the arrangement of the fates which conspired for us to meet.
It is not often that you meet a really good man.
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2 comments:
I love this. It's a great example of the kind of people that are the best kind to meet. I have a secret hope for my soon to be landlady. She is very businesslike but sometimes the way she says something or looks at me when I say something, it makes me wonder if we aren't, as Anne would have said, 'kindred spirits'. But then she seems to like me, and of course a person is always easily likeable when they start out by liking you.
He sounds like a lovely man. And he is right to be pragmatic about his daughter. MS varies from person to person but the prospects are not necessarily as bleak as the media gives you to believe. I hope his positivity rubs off on her as that, along with his support,will help see her through.
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