A Tale of Two Women.

Ah, if only I could write it as a piece of fiction. It would be a tale of toughness and vulnerability, of openness and guardedness, of honesty and hypocrisy, of gentleness and truculence, of grace and vindictiveness, of erudition and naiveté, of arcane wisdom and childlike misapprehension, and of the straight and the disingenuous.

I won’t, of course. It would take a much greater literary talent than mine to put the pieces together in some order even remotely approaching the coherent. It would be like trying to rearrange the pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope while somebody is still turning it. Only one factor stands out in simple certainty: when two people have entrenched views at opposite ends of an issue which is, to each of them, non-negotiable, the only ways to go are separate.

So now I can come home and change the record having learned some valuable lessons, not least among which is that it’s never too late to learn valuable lessons.

Problem, though. Now that they're both gone, there's a damn big hole inside of me that needs filling with something and I don't know what. Onion rings?