Every once in a while, I'm going to throw a monkey wrench into this blog and post something serious, like this. As much as this site is dedicated to making 2006 more fun, life is not always a party. Sometimes, it's a poem.

The words of this poem are sad and sweet.

Tuesday, I had lunch with a woman I'd last seen 18 years ago. Sylvia and her son Ryan, then 10, our landlady Ginny, and I shared a house in the late '80s. Ginny, a divorced woman in her 60s, owned the cabin in the town in which I held my second job. I leased a small bedroom from her. Sylvia and Ryan leased the basement efficiency apartment.

Sylvia was freshly divorced then, almost 10 years my senior, working hard to support herself and her son, dealing with a difficult ex-husband who castigated her relentlessly. I was fresh out of college, excited by my career, drinking to frequent excess and still perfecting the art of flirtation. Children were not on my agenda. Neither was divorce. Her life seemed worlds apart from mine, tinged with a sadness I did not want to touch me.

Nevertheless, we liked one another. I remember little of our conversations, only that Ginny, Sylvia, Ryan and I shared some nice moments in that 1920s cabin. Four generations under one small roof. Three compact cars vying for space in the short, narrow driveway, the last one home for the night (inevitably mine), typically parked on the shoulder of narrow, winding Shady Lane.

I lived there less than a year before moving two hours away to a ski resort community, invited there by the man who is now my ex-husband and son's father.

Sylvia and Ginny took me to dinner at the area's finest restaurant before I left. I remember only because I have a photograph of the three of us, nicely dressed, clinking wine glasses and grinning wildly for the camera. My mind, no doubt, was already forging ahead to the life that awaited me with my then-boyfriend.

I forgot Sylvia for years, remembering her only for a few seconds at a time when I flipped through the photo album and glanced at the picture.

Almost three years ago, I moved back down the mountain.

A week ago, as I was leaving the county office building, a woman called my name. She was stooped, with short, curly hair that was more gray than the brown it obviously once had been. "Do you remember me?" she asked, peering up into my face.

Instantly, miraculously, I remembered Sylvia and saw her in this aging woman's face. She was now a county employee, working in the assessor's office. Ryan was 28, and a mortgage broker. She asked about my son and my divorce; I had no idea she knew about either of these developments in my life.

Sylvia and I had lunch Tuesday. She lives, she said, in a small apartment with "no personality." She loves her job and recently was promoted.

"I never met or married," she told me. "I just look like an old lady, but really, I'm only 50."

She's had five back surgeries since last I knew her, one in which doctors mistakenly cut an artery in her leg. They inserted a tube they later realized was made of material harmful to human bone. She is, as a result of all this, permanently disabled, forever stooped.

"The doctors are sorry," she said, rolling her eyes and smiling. "They told me they're sorry."

Her share of the settlement from a class-action lawsuit was minimal.

At one point, she lost the use of her arms and legs. For a year, she moved only with a walker.

"But I got my arms and legs back," she said. "It could have been so much worse."

Ryan, she said, had gone through several years of drug addiction, years in which she woke daily not knowing if he were stilll alive. He survived.

Her sister did not. She died of breast cancer, and Sylvia - still working to regain her own mobility - cared for her round-the-clock for the last three years of her sister's life. Ryan, meanwhile, slowly climbed back into sobriety and society.

"I had some dark years," she said, her expression serene. "But these are happy years. Things are good now."

Another sister lives nearby. The two take a walk every evening. She sees Ryan regularly.

"He's so excited to see you," she said. "He always thought you were cool, too."

"You were always in my thoughts; I want you to know that. I've wondered about you so often. I'm just not good about keeping in touch."

I offered the appropriate response, but flushed with guilt, thinking how - with almost absolute completeness - I had forgotten Sylvia and Ryan all those years.

We parted on the sidewalk. "Don't worry," she said. "I'm happy now. Believe me." I looked at her relaxed face and smiling eyes, and I believed.

She walked back to the county building as I headed for the city parking garage. I watched her go, her back bent, head cocked up, arms clasped behind her back. She would never stand straight again. She likely would stay single, content to walk nightly walks with her sister and talk with her son, and work a job in which she felt needed and productive.

She does not move with grace anymore, but there is no one I currently know more graceful in spirit than Sylvia. She is a living lesson in peace and acceptance that I, a strong and able-bodied woman who is almost never completly content, am only beginning to learn.