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I hold it true, whatever befall;

I feel it, when I sorrow most;

‘Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.  AGPareja; February 2009

As soon as he sat down on the bench he began to drift back to that

Valentine’s Day eighteen years before. It had been at this very same

bench. He had been coming here every Valentine’s Day. He would sit for an hour or so and remember her and how he had loved her. He had planned to ask her to marry him on that day eighteen years before. His mind drifted back and in his mind’s eye he could see her and his heart could feel what he had felt on that day.

He had only known her for nine months. When he was twenty-five years old that seemed to be a longer period of time that it now did. He thought about how they had met. People that he worked with were going out for Friday night drinks and they had asked him to come. This was something that they only did a few times a year and he had never gone with them before. When this was pointed out to him he said that he would join them.

It was a large bar and a band was playing classic rock and dance music. He sat at the bar nursing a beer while listening to the music. That was when he first noticed her. She was sitting at a table with another woman. He glanced at her from the corner of his eye and in that strange communication that is without words he knew that she knew that he was looking at her. There was about ten minutes of this thing of her noticing him noticing her while he was doing the same. It was interrupted when the band took a break and his co-workers began to chit-chat. As soon as the music started up again he gazed directly at her and in an instant that was unlike him he stepped off of his stool and walked directly towards her table. She watched him as he walked towards her and their eyes met before words were spoken.

“Would you like to dance?”, he asked. Her eyes looked away from his as she said, “I can’t”. It wasn’t the answer that he had hoped for. He muttered “Okay” and started to turn to walk away. Her hand reached out towards his, “No wait, sit down.” He smiled and as soon as he sat down he said, “I can’t dance either.” They sat and talked in staccato conversation at points where the music got lower. One of his co-workers joined him at the table and a few minutes later the co-worker and her friend were up and dancing.

” Are you sure you don’t want to dance?” She shook her head to say no but her eyes said that she was not definite so he asked, “Are you sure, there is no harm in trying?” She grinned and said, “I really can’t but I’ll try.” As soon as she stood up he noticed the cane hanging on the back of her chair. She walked towards the dance floor without it, dragging her right leg while limping. He followed her slowly and they started to dance. The ‘dancing’ lasted about two minutes before she fell down, landing on her left knee. He helped her back to the table. When she sat down she giggled and said, “I guess that you were wrong about it not hurting to try.”

He sat on the bench and re-played the scene in his mind. Then he fast forwarded to that Valentine’s Day eighteen years before, right here at this very same bench. She was from Ohio and had moved to Connecticut two years before they had met. It was a whirlwind relationship and they had both rushed off into the high that comes when two souls touch. He had rehearsed it in his head. They would take a walk in the park and then sit at a bench and he would ask her to marry him. But something had happened that was not part of the rehearsal that he had played in his head. As soon as they sat down she said that she had something to tell him. He listened. Her grandmother was sick. She was going back to Ohio for a few weeks. She would call him and it would not be long before she would see him. He decided to hold off on his question. He would ask her when she got back. They would return to this bench. As soon as he thought this a wave of worry washed over him. It seemingly came out of nowhere. What if he were to never see her again? Instead of the rehearsal that he had played out in his mind he blurted out, “I’m afraid that I won’t see you again.” She smiled a smile that reassured him, “Don’t be afraid I’ll see you soon.” As they stood up he clasped her hand and whispered in her ear,”I love you.” She looked down at her right leg , All of me?” He kissed her gently and whispered softly, ” Every part of you, forever, I promise.”

She would be staying with her cousin, not far from the nursing home where her grandmother was. Two days after she left he called he called the number that she had given him. Her cousin answered and took a message. She phoned him back the following day and they talked for fifteen minutes or so. He only spoke with her once after that. She didn’t return his phone calls until the late night call that he received after not hearing from her for almost two weeks. She said that she was sorry for not calling, she had been busy. They chit-chatted and she said that she would talk to him soon. He sensed that something was different during this conversation and he had been right. Three days later he phoned her and her cousin said that she had moved. He never heard from her again.

In the weeks that followed he wondered a lot. Wondered what had happened. Wondered how he had let it happen. Wondered why he had been so foolish. Wondered how she could mean so much to him that he could not see that he mattered little to her. Wondered if things might have been different if he had followed the script that he had rehearsed in his head for that Valentine’s Day. Wondered what her answer would have been. Wondered if she realized how much she meant to him. Wondered why she did not just tell him that it was over. Wondered why she had whispered “I love you” when the times they had engaged in a lover’s embrace. The worst part about this wondering was that there wasn’t anyone to share it with. He wished that he could unfold it all, the whole story, all of the wondering to another person. Then he could ask, What do you think happened?” But there wasn’t anyone else because he felt to foolish to talk about it with anyone. Two months after the last time that he had spoken with her he phoned her cousin asking how he could reach her. Her cousin’s reply was, “She’s unreachable.” He started to sob right there on the

phone. “If you see her please tell her that I still love her and can she please call me?” He gave her cousin his phone number even though he knew that he had given it to her the last time that he had called.

It took a few months but eventually the wondering receded. It didn’t fully go away but he wondered less often. He accepted that there were things that he would not know, that there was no answer to all of the wondering and that anything would just be conjecture. He moved on. That is what survivors of soul wounds do. Some move forward, some become hardened, some hurt others, and some wall themselves off from others. He was determined to move forward but he did not forget her and knew that he never would. In this way she would always be a part of him in some small way. When souls touch they leave graffiti.

One year after the last time that he had seen her he returned to the bench and thought about her and the last day that he had seen her. He sat on the bench on a day that was not unlike that Valentine’s Day the year before. It was still winter but there was a hint of spring in the air and the promise of what would grow and blossom. He felt at the cross and chain hanging around his neck. The word “Love” was engraved on the cross. She had given it to him. He contemplated taking it off and throwing it as far as he could in an act to symbolize closure. He didn’t do it because he knew that it would only be symbolic and that real closure would only come from speaking with her. He imagined what he might say if she could hear him. He reflected on this and reached down into all that he knew of his knowing her. In his mind’s eye

he spoke. The words came to him in an instant, utterances from his soul:

There is a place I enter in.

What never was, what might have been.

Where are you now, what do you seek?

Afraid to talk?, me I still speak.

I say the things I never said,

In conversations inside my head.

If you could hear, you’d understand,

What never was, was also planned.

He returned to the bench every Valentine’s Day and remembered his love for her. Something significant happened before his third Valentine’s Day alone at the bench. Two weeks before Valentine’s Day he received a Sunday morning 10 a.m. phone call from her cousin. There had been complications during childbirth and she had died the night before. “You said that you loved her. I thought that you should know.” If asked if she had been married and was told that she was not. There would be a brief memorial service and she would be cremated. He thanked her cousin for calling and hung up the phone. He went to a drawer and took out the cross and chain that she had given him. He laid down , stared at the ceiling and held the cross in his hand slowly moving his index finger over the word “Love”. He picked up the phone and called her cousin. Could he come to the memorial service? She told him where and when it would be.

The memorial service would be at 10 a.m. Tuesday. He flew to Ohio on Monday arriving late at night and taking a taxi to a hotel not far from where the memorial service would be. On Tuesday morning he took a taxi to a small church. He arrived fifteen minutes before the service was to begin and introduced himself to a woman setting out framed photos on a table at the front of the church. The woman was her cousin. He looked at the photos. There she was from little girl to grown woman. In one she looked to be about ten years old and she was sitting on a bicycle. He remembered her voice telling him of the car accident she had been in when she was thirteen years old and how she had become a three legged person referring to her cane. He looked at a photo of her as he had known her. He stared closely at the photo and could see the cross that she was wearing. It was the cross that she had taken off of her neck and put around his. Tears began to trickle down his cheeks as he sat down. He was close to the front of the church. He glanced at her cousin sitting in the row of seats to his right. He shot a quick glance behind him. There were only two other people besides him and her cousin. The minister said some kind words and quoted scripture. It was clear by what was said that the minister did not know her. The service lasted fifteen minutes.

He walked towards the doors of the church. The two people who had been sitting behind him introduced themselves as co-workers from the restaurant where she had worked. They shook his hand and walked down the church steps. He looked at her cousin, “Do you have time to talk?” She forced a smile through teary eyes and they went for coffee. It was between breakfast and lunch and there were few people in the diner. They sat down at a corner booth. He wanted to ask questions about the things that he had wondered about. Maybe this would bring some answers, some closure, or at least something close to it. He didn’t know where to start. Sitting with this stranger had added another wonder. What did she know of him?

He began by asking a question that he had wondered about at the church, right after the two co-workers had introduced themselves. Before that he had thought that the man might be her boyfriend and the baby’s father. “Who’s the father of the baby?” She was silent for a moment, looked down at her coffee, sipped at it, then said, “I don’t know and neither does anyone else. She’s in foster care now and will be put up for adoption.” He didn’t know what to say. His face dropped, “What? How can nobody know who the father is?” Her eyes darted back down towards her coffee. “She slept around a lot.”

There had been too much wondering. He did not want to leave with more questions. He did not want to have another un-finished conversation. He drank deep of what she told him. In her grief she shared in a way that she might not have otherwise. He listened. In a flash of realization he understood that while he had loved her he had not fully known her. He had only known a part of her.

She had never known her father. Her mother was a heroin addict who had become a prostitute to support her habit. One time her mother had ran off with a customer. Her pimp was angry and he waited for her at her apartment. After two days had gone by he became so enraged that he locked her daughter up in a bedroom, bound her hands behind her back and repeatedly raped her. She was only thirteen years old. When he left the bedroom she escaped by crashing through a third floor window. That was how her leg had been injured. There had been nerve damage. When she left the hospital she went to live with her grandmother who was the only adult who had ever treated her decent. She fell in with a bad crowd when she was sixteen years old. Her self-esteem was low and she would do just about anything for some attention. By the time she was eighteen she was addicted to snorting coke and was selling her body on the street. She had gone to Connecticut to escape from her pimp and to get off of coke. The trip had been arranged by a young street preacher whose life had been threatened for helping street girls by helping them to relocate and setting them up with a job and a place to stay. Her cousin wiped at the tears streaming down her cheeks. “I’m the one who got him to talk to her. I had him come to my place when I knew that she would be there.” She looked at the cross hanging around his neck. “He gave that to her and told her that the cross was not a symbol of suffering but a symbol of love overcoming suffering.”

Her grandmother had been sick. Three weeks after she had returned to Ohio her grandmother died. She fell back in with some people that she had known before and while she stayed away from hooking she had gotten back into coke. She ended up bouncing from man to man, anew one every month or two. “Most just used her, some were abusive, all of them had coke.” Somewhere during the conversation he had started to cry. He whispered, “I loved her.” Her cousin looked into his eyes and said, “I know. She thought that you were too good for her.” He wiped at his tears with a napkin, “How do you know that?” She reached across the table and touched his hand. “Because she told me. She was worried that she would hurt you if you found out about her past. She felt guilty for lying to you.” There is a communion when strangers share tears with each other and he knew that she meant what she had said. “I wanted to ask her to marry me.”

She clasped at his hand and whispered, “She always spoke well of you.”

Less than two weeks later he sat on the bench on Valentine’s Day. Three years had passed since the last time he had seen her. On this day he replayed in his head what had occurred on that first Valentine’s Day. He could hear the words that they had spoken to each other, words etched upon his soul. His life had been touched by her and he had felt in ways that he had never felt before. The whole thing had been an opening. He could feel more now. He was grateful for the experience. He had come to know himself more. What he decided that fourth Valentine’s Day on the bench was life changing. But that was long ago.

Now it was eighteen years since that first Valentine’s Day. He sat on the bench and placed the cross around his neck between his thumb and index finger. He said a silent prayer to the Spirit that moves within each of us but is not felt by everyone. It was through this Spirit that he still felt her. There had been others before and after her. There had even been a marriage that had ended two years before. It had only lasted three years. He reflected on that and how it started as a mutual convenience for two people who didn’t have much in common other than approaching middle
age, being single, and not wanting to be. I thought it fortunate that they had not had children together. He had dated over the years but most of the woman had seemed fearful of emotional intimacy or perhaps he just felt too deep. It was different with her. He had only been with her for nine months but he had felt closer to her than any of the others. He had never promised anyone what he had promised her.

That first year they had walked to the park but now he lived an hour dive away. It was 3 p.m. and traffic was very light. As he drove home he thought of the joy that had come from the promise that grew out of his love for her. He went into the house and walked into the kitchen. His fifteen year old daughter was sitting at the table sipping tea and looking at a magazine. He opened the refrigerator, took out a bottle of water, and sat down across from her. “Are you okay daddy?” He grinned and said, “I’m fine.” She looked directly at him. “You look like you’ve been crying.” He was silent for a moment. “I was thinking about your mother.” She knew that Valentine’s Day was special to him but she didn’t fully know why. “You must have really loved her. I love you daddy.” He looked across the table, smiled and said, “I love you too Promise.”

United States is one of the havens of the best seafood restaurants in the globe.

Hook Restaurant is a well-maintained seafood restaurant in Washington D.C. operated by Chef Barton Seaver, who co-owns this place. The grilled calamari and the bluefish are the two most favorite items on the Hook’s menu. The calamari is cooked over a wooden grill and dished up with basil walnut pesto and warm potato salad. Most of the diners like to have it sliced, fried, and served with marinara sauce but the calamari is usually left in one or two pieces while it’s grilled. The bluefish is cooked on a level grill and dished up with grilled lemon together with the same pesto with the calamari and a potato parsnip cake. The bluefish has a great flavor but it rots very quickly and this is the reason why many chefs and home cooks are cautious of using it but it has become one of the top dishes on the Hook’s Restaurant menu and many of their regular diners have really taken a liking to this fish.

This restaurant is specifically a sustainable seafood restaurant. It creates a remarkable dining experience but it’s a restaurant with a conscience because the owners believe that they are also responsible for ocean conservation.

Restaurant Nora in Washington D.C is also one of the prominent seafood restaurants in the United States and it is the first restaurant to receive the organic certification, which means that the 95% of the ingredients used in this restaurant must come from expert organic farmers, growers, and suppliers. Nora Pouillon is the owner of this 23-year-old restaurant and the founding member of the Seafood Choices Alliance, an international association for sustainable seafood. It makes the seafood market environmentally and economically sustainable both on the fishermen and fish farmers to the wholesalers, retailers and restaurants. Menu on Restaurant Nora varies daily and features fresh, in season seafood among its organic selection. Lobster and salmon is one of the favorite seafood that this restaurant prepared because of its versatility, you can prepare this food in many different ways.

The Lundy Brothers Restaurant was serving seafood at the biggest restaurant in the United States with a seating capacity of 2400 persons but now its seating capacity was reduced to 700 people. The New York Preservation Commission chose this restaurant as a landmark in 1992. It was located at the heart of Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. They offered a wide variety of seafood that is simple and well prepared.

Fore Street is a contemporary restaurant in Portland, Maine. At Fore Street menu, they concentrate on the best raw materials from community Maine farmers, fishermen, foragers and cheese makers. Their menu changes everyday based on the availability of the materials they need in their restaurants but one of the few items on their menu list that has become the signature dish of their restaurant is the wood oven roasted mussels and this is the most requested recipe.

The Newport Bay Restaurant is one of the most well known seafood restaurants in the Pacific Northwest, New Port Bay. This is a relaxing place where you can enjoy the ocean’s bounty. The clamed chowder, flame-broiled Alaskan salmon and classic Halibut fish and chips are always the crowd pleasers and always on the top of the list of their diner’s menu. Truly, in the United States there are a lot of seafood restaurants that offers good food and an astounding ambience.

Consuming raw foods is natural. Our bodies respond very well to all that is fresh and vital and thrive when consuming these types of food. By increasing the amount of raw food that you eat you are actually opting for a feeling of increased well being. When you switch to a raw food diet, the raw food recipes are based on uncooked or unprocessed plant foods, preferably organic. These plant foods include a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, grains, dried fruit, fresh juices and purified water.

The reason why you should switch to raw food recipes is because it is basically a vegetarian diet that promotes eating and drinking living foods. By consuming living foods and juices, you benefit from the maximum amount of fiber that can be found in a raw product. This fiber can be lost when the food is either processed or cooked. Raw foods are metabolized easier and are not as high in calories as the products consumed when following an average diet. The basic principle of a raw food diet is heating the foods up to 1160 F or about 460 C. The reason why you should not heat them at higher temperatures is found in the enzymes that are destroyed when subjected to such temperatures. The enzymes help food digestion and food absorption and they also give the nutritional value of foods. Therefore it is in our best interests to keep them intact. In the opposite situation, we actually force our bodies to an increased amount of work and we also contribute to the diminishing of the nutritional value of our food.

Subsequently, the benefits of raw food recipes are numerous. If you have a diet consistent of at least 75% raw foods you will receive health benefits such as increased energy, improved skin appearance, better digestion, weight loss or weight gain (depending on what your body needs). Other benefits include reducing the risks of serious illnesses like heart diseases, cancer, diabetes and more.

Raw food recipes are based on components that contain little or no saturated fats. Also, they are low in sodium, but high on magnesium, potassium and fiber. You can also use raw food recipes as detoxification solutions. If you appeal to different combinations of raw, living foods and juices you may find that they are useful for colon cleansing, liver cleansing, kidney cleansing and skin cleansing.

The reasons why you should appeal to a raw food diet may vary. Depending on these reasons, you can choose what to consume in order to improve that aspect of your health you are particularly interested in. For instance, sprouted brown rice helps slow glucose absorption and improve the metabolism; cabbage supports cellular function while radish leaves act as an anti-oxidant; carrots, a great source of vitamin A, are well-known to encourage healthy eyesight, but they also support a reliable cardio-vascular system.

Some people enjoy eating cakes and sweets. If you switch to a raw food diet, you shouldn’t think that you have to stop eating desserts. In a raw food diet you can use raw honey as a sweetener. Raw honey contains traces of propolis, a substance used by bees to seal the hive and protect it from harmful microorganisms. Other substances found in raw honey, called phytonutrients, help prevent colon cancer and can also help heal internal ulcers.

If you consume honey regularly, it is known to be beneficial for the general well-being and it also helps digestion. Amazing as it sounds, raw honey has been shown to improve athletic performance, a secret that was discovered by ancient Olympians. This happens because it helps maintain balanced levels of blood sugar, which in turn helps at keeping energy levels consistent. In addition, it helps muscle recovery. Other amazing properties of raw honey include the support it gives to the immune system in warding off colds and flu. It is a healthy substitute for sugar that can even help reduce the cholesterol levels. Include it in your raw food recipes and you will get the best for your body and mind.