Barbara V Evers

The woman spoke.  "I believe he is gone for good." How do you interpret those words?  What is she feeling about the man's being gone?  Left as this is, you interpret this based on your own current circumstances, but what if I broaden your vision of what's occurring in this moment? The woman's gaze drifted beyond us, her eyes losing their focus on the things around her.  A few moments later, she spoke, her voice soft and measured.  "I believe he is gone for good." How do you interpret this woman's statement now?  Has it changed? If you look only at the words she speaks, you can read any emotion you want into them, but once you take them within the context of the description, you realize there is more going on. We probably don't know enough from this one passage to interpret it properly, but I wanted to show how the addition of body language, or nonverbal communication, and tone of voice can change the way you interpret someone's wo...

Heidi with Abraham "You should make these.  It only takes flour, water, and sugar, ya know," the woman said to me as she handed me the bag. "What?" I asked, unsure if I'd heard her correctly. She repeated the same line verbatim. "Yeah, but yours are so good," I said and accepted the cookie from the cashier and left. An odd conversation considering I just bought the cookie from the place where she worked.  Plus,  inaccurate.  There's at least one other ingredient to this particular cookie. As strange as that was, I didn't think about it again until much later.  Maybe because it couldn't rival some of the other odd experiences of the week. It started last Saturday around 2am when I received a text from my daughter, Heidi, telling me she missed her red-eye flight out of LAX.  A freak accident on the LA freeway stopped all traffic at 10 pm, and she got to the ticket counter twenty-nine minutes before her flight.  The agents want...