Magdalena

Everybody called her “Maggie” but she never seemed like a Maggie to me. I’m not especially fond of nicknames (though I’ve accumulated a fair number of them in my time) but I understand that they fit some people like a glove and I don’t fret overmuch about it.

That said, nicknames don’t fit some people at all…Maggie never fit her. Once she (kind of reluctantly) told me her given name…Magdalena…I never called her anything else because that fit her like a glove (I’m not sure if she minded…I think not because she was the kind of woman who would have said if she was bothered.)

Magdalena was an enigma to me and to most of the other people who worked in the same offices as we did. She didn’t smile that often but her dark eyes were always bright with laughing, knowing, daunting energy. They were also infused with an almost tangible melancholy that revealed itself most tellingly in her rare, unguarded moments.

She walked softly and talked softly and flitted just outside the reach of anybody trying to get inside her personal space. She used Jesus and her quietly acerbic wit to keep people at bay but she couldn’t completely hide the caring heart she guarded so carefully (it seemed like she had endured more than her share of heartache through the years but I never knew for sure since she only doled out tantalizing tidbits of her past from time to time.)

I think she thought of me as awkward but somewhat endearing buffoon…and back then I probably was…but she tolerated me graciously just the same.

I lost track of Magdalena when I quit both the company we worked at and the city of Los Angeles to move south but I always hoped she’d found happiness…the melancholy in her dark eyes was something that was as out of place as the nickname was…in a circle of love (as sexist as it may or may not sound, she seemed like a woman destined to be the firm but loving mother to a good number of children.) If there is any justice in the universe it has proven to be so.