Yes, I’m up at going on 3 a.m. after coming home from the doctor’s with good news. But whatever it is that’s still following me saps a lot of the energy out of me because it gets me out of bed at odd hours.

I almost didn’t want today’s news to be good news.

This is why. I was thinking all day of people like Janine Plassard and old friends like my teacher Jim Hayes or Jim Watson, a student Elizabeth and I just lost, and the news they got wasn’t good. Believe me, people prayed for them, too.

These are just three lives of so many that ended too early or are in such peril while my life is neither over nor in any imminent danger. It’s not fair.

So I’m angry with God now. Please allow me to be. We fight all the time; our arguments are fundamental to my faith. That’s the way He intended me to be when He gave me life.

Janine led the kind of life that gave life to others. So did my journalism professor at Poly, Jim Hayes, who made me a better writer and a better human being. It was Jim who first steered me toward teaching. When I was twenty, he made me a writing coach for other Poly journalism students. I found that I loved it, loved teaching. Jim knew that about me before I did.

Janine loved teaching, too. This was her profession, her passion, her vocation and, even though she’d hotly deny it, her ministry. Like Jim, she made better writers–there’s no better example than Kaytlyn Leslie, a superb Tribune reporter who has so much promise. Janine was her first journalism teacher at Nipomo High. She was Kaytlyn’s compass just as Jim was mine.

And just like Jim–we heard this over and over again at her celebration of life last weekend–Janine made better human beings, too.

Elizabeth and I were lucky enough to have dinner with Janine and our friends JIm and Cheryl and Mark and Evie at Rosa’s a few weeks before she died. She looked frail and was just a little subdued but every once in awhile she’d say something with a little barb to it so that it made you gasp momentarily and then laugh.

I looked down at her at the end of the table and it was obvious that she was enjoying her meal–we love Rosa’s–and her wine. She was savoring it. I think she was discerning the earth and the oak and maybe even the sunlight that had ripened the grapes.

She was eating like an Italian, who are masters of the unhurried meal. Italian food is intended to be savored like Janine’s wine. An Italian dinner is about watching your table-mate take that first bite of butternut squash ravioli, watching his eyes close momentarily with pleasure at the taste; it’s about being happy for him.

Then it’s your turn to eat.

But even the eating is secondary to Italians. Janine understood that. Good food is the pretext for bringing friends and family together, for enjoying each other, for telling stories and remembering those odd relatives that we all have; it’s about arguing over baseball. This is how you find life, at the table in other lives.

I don’t know why Janine had to give up her life and I’ve still got mine. I don’t know why I nearly died as a baby but didn’t. I was born in Taft premature and blue and strangling when the doctor, who’d been out of town, suddenly burst through the door and ordered my Dad out. He’d had a hunch. These are mysteries that both bewilder and anger me. It’s not fair.

At the end of the meal at Rosa’s, Janine and I hugged and it felt so good that I said to her: “Oh! I want to do that again!”

“You better.” she said, and she said it quickly. It was a retort, even an admonishment. She meant it. She meant, too, that she knew she didn’t have much time.

So I’m not thinking much today about my luck. I’m wishing I could watch that luck happen in other lives, filling them with life just the way that good ravioli does.

I wish I could say that then it’s my turn to eat. But, to tell you the truth, I’m not all that hungry.

I would rather rest my chin on my cupped hand, elbow on the table, and watch Janine down at the other end, watch the way she drinks wine and watch, too, her eyes close with pleasure at all the flavors she discovers in her first forkful of pasta.