I had the sadness this morning.  When dealing with this sort of unhappiness, and being forced to be in public, I did what I always do.  I phoned home.  For some reason, it feels much more sane to have tears streaming down your face while having a phone to your ear, than it does to be the random person walking down the street who is crying and occasionally having trouble breathing due to slight hyperventilation.  After talking to my dad, who was exactly as I needed him to be at that moment, I phoned my sister.  Sisters are great.  They make you laugh and it doesn’t matter that you just blubbered something incoherent into the phone, because they know that it translates into ‘I’m just so sad’ and they don’t make fun of you for sounding like you have sand in your mouth.  I talked with her while I wandered down the hill towards the ferry that I take to work every morning.  By this time there was a lot of laughing mixed in with the tears.  I wasn’t quite ready to deal with strangers in an enclosed space where I would be trapped on water, so I walked to my bench by the seawall and sat down.  This bench and I go way back.  It’s where I sit when I’m sad, usually because a relationship has just ended, and I’m always on the phone with my sister while I sit there.  The trek down the hill had brought on a coughing fit that is courtesy of the strep throat I have just recovered from and the sound I make when I cough is not unlike the honking sound that geese make.  So there I was, with the crying and the laughing and the honking, and things suddenly didn’t seem so bad.  Sure, people made a wide circle around me and avoided making eye contact and I startled someone so much with an unexpected cough that they actually jumped, but damnit, I felt a little better.  And you know, after that, things just kept improving.