Yeah. Love.

So I’ve been turning the past few days over in my mind, looking at them from all directions, thinking about everything Alecto already said about them, and wondering what, if anything, I could possibly add.

Not much.

But I’ll try.

I was blessed with the opportunity to meet Alecto at Hatteras back in July, so I knew what to expect as far the campground goes. Plus, I’d already gotten past the weirdness of meeting someone in person for the first time after getting to know her for the previous two years or so.

There was no weirdness to that first meeting, though. Not for me anyway. I don’t think there was for Alecto either. We met in the parking lot, I followed her to our cabin, got out of my car and into hers, and off we went to the grocery store for dinner fixins’. It was like we did this every day.

Since July I’ve found myself lapsing into Alecto-speak. I likes it. And I’s keeping it.

This time I got to see CG meet Alecto in person, and the magic happened again. And CG and I got to meet Florkow, and there it was again.

I’ve probably mentioned somewhere on here at some point that I moved around a lot growing up. Girlfriends? Had a couple of them, early. When we left CG’s hometown I was fourteen years old. Leaving those friends hurt so incredibly badly that I swore I would NEVER allow myself to hurt like that again. And mostly I didn’t. Spent the rest of high school and college all by myself in the girl department.

CG and I have known each other a long time. We lost each other for a long time. When we found each other again she said something that floored me. You know how you wonder sometimes if anything you did or anyone you met as a kid made an impact on the world in any way at all? Maybe not, but I do. After that first reconnection I knew that I had indeed made a difference in her life, and was amazed at that. Confession, repentance, acceptance, love. All of it. She’s been there ever since. And, through CG, along comes Alecto and damn if lightning doesn’t strike twice.

Sunday was a bad fibro day for me. These women saw me at pretty close to my worst. And it was OK. I did grab my sunglasses a couple of times so I could hide behind them, for a couple of reasons. One was to cover up the ouch-face. But the other, well, that was to hide a bit of sadness because I knew Monday morning was coming, it was coming VERY early, and we’d all go our separate ways.There were these moments when my brain said “girl, you better enjoy this ’cause it’ll never happen again, not in a million years.” Other times I thought “so this is what all those girls did after graduation when they ran off to the beach together”, only I think this was better, deeper, more real than any of that.

What will I remember? Everything. Who knew you can’t actually see the battery underneath the hood of a BMW?? Not us, and not Jack the weener dog’s daddy either. You know the little green plastic plug-thing that comes with a bottle of camping fuel? We learned what not to do with it. The best food to eat for lunch on the beach: leftover pancake and link sausage pigs-in-a-blanket, and peanut butter, jelly and potato chips on white bread. The best food to eat at the campground: stuff we cooked that had ingredients grown in the backyard, or on the farm. I learned that I can indeed eat raw clams. I have the shells to prove it. And three of us were wishing for a demonstration of Demond. There are surfers at Hatteras that really know how to surf, and waves big enough for them to show off their skills. They has skills.

How do you explain to anyone that you’re going to the beach with people you’ve never met, but you know in your heart that you’ve known each of them for a million years? For me, the answer still is: you don’t. There’s not a soul in this part of my world who would understand it, except my husband. And besides that, I’m greedy and if there was someone who could understand it, I wouldn’t share it anyway.

Because it’s mine; it’s ours. And I’s keeping it.

 

girls just wanna have fun

We’re going to do just that.

Alecto, CG, a friend of Alecto’s, and I are all converging on Hatteras tomorrow afternoon. Last July I was blessed with an opportunity to hang w/ Alecto et. al. at Hatteras and the plotting for this weekend began. Today I’m kidnapping CG and bringing her to my house.

I wonder sometimes, like daily, what I did to deserve the friendship of these women. I’m a very introverted person; making and keeping friends has always been hard for me. Granted, CG and I go way back…to the 4th grade. But we lost each other for something like 25 years or so. Alecto and I crossed paths through CG. It feels like I’ve known her all my life, too.

We are diverse; we are similar.

We are urban, suburban, rural.

We are Yankee, Rebel, mid-Western methodist, southern Baptist, heathen, liberal, conservative, socialist, libertarian.

We are mothers, wives, daughters, sisters.

We are.

And we are gonna have fun.

 

Taylor and Maria

See that guy in the video up there? His name is Taylor Cameron Carpenter.

If you Google him you find out he’s a “rock star organist”.

When he was about 14, he was our church organist while he attended Arts high school in the area. When I think about those years now it blows my mind to realize he was only 14. His technical skills at the organ, or piano, harpsichord, whatever, are exceptional. But what always amazed me was his ability to improvise. I’m not talking about a typical improv an organist would do to get from a hymn in one key and meter to another hymn in other key and/or meter.

In December 1995 a dear friend of ours died from a rare form of cancer. She and her family were ardent supporters of the arts. Her memorial service was not only a tribute to her life, but also a musical celebration of her life offered by Taylor. It was mentioned that our friend had a flair for the dramatic when it came to her artistic talent. She was a painter, sculptor, singer, decorator. Everything she did was uniquely her own, and sometimes got her into a teensy bit of trouble. Like the year she decorated the fellowship hall for Christmas by hanging the Christmas tree upside-down from the ceiling. It was a fad for a year or two, as I recall. But she embraced it! There was the tree, hanging down in all its glory, and people were talking! You would have thought she’d desecrated a sacred icon, instead of twisting an adapted pagan symbol into something completely different, as Monty Python would say.

So, in her memorial service our pastor compared her to “Maria” from “The Sound of Music”, and referred to the song “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” when speaking of her.

Once the memorial part of the service was complete, it was time for Taylor’s musical offering. I remember him playing “In the Bleak Mid-Winter”, which had been one of her favorite carols. There were a couple of other pieces that I can’t recall specifically. One was probably a hymn.

But THIS, I remember: As Taylor played, a simple melody was forming above the frenzy of notes flying from his hands and feet. It was familiar, but not quite above the threshold of recognizability. At first the notes were elongated, making it harder to pull them out of the mire. But as the tempo increased, and the melody rose from the bass line to the upper registers, there it was: How do you solve a problem like Maria?

Of course, my friend’s name wasn’t Maria. And now Taylor is world-famous and goes by Cameron.

But for that one moment in time, on a cold December afternoon, Taylor and Maria danced.

And it was magic.

 

Thanksgiving, again

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, again.

We used to go to the beach for Thanksgiving, husband, kids, mom and dad. We’d rent a house and either cook a meal or order one from Food Lion. The last time we went to the beach for Thanksgiving was in 2003, and we took the flu with us. We all had it at one point or another during the week, except for Daddy. He was healthy the whole week, while the rest of us took turns with the fever, chills, headaches, etc. Daddy was looking at real estate magazines, and I think he and Mama might have actually considered selling out and moving to the beach. Since we were all sick, we went out for Thanksgiving dinner, to the buffet at the Lucky Fisherman. We all left the beach a day early because we were sick.

That happened once before, on a trip to the beach for Thanksgiving. We had rented a different house. Mama and Daddy left for the beach before we did, because hubby and I both had to work. When we got to there on Tuesday, Daddy wasn’t feeling very well and he got worse as the week progressed. We cooked Thanksgiving dinner. On Friday morning, I got up to find Mama and Daddy packed and leaving, heading straight for home and the hospital. We thought then that we’d had our last Thanksgiving together. I remember Mama asking me to take a lot of pictures that year, just in case. After they left for the hospital, I felt so lost and confused. We went to a local gift shop and I bought a Christmas present for Daddy, a tide clock for the Cape Fear River inlet, so he’d always know when the tides were at the beach, even when he was home. I think I was gambling that as long as he had the tide clock he wouldn’t leave, and I guess it worked for a couple of years at least.

Daddy died 3 weeks before Thanksgiving in 2004. On the Friday before Thanksgiving my baby boy came home from school and said that someone had found a suicide note in his 4th period desk and he had been questioned about it, but that he hadn’t written it. The following Monday he admitted that he had written it, and my emotions kicked into overdrive. I called my next-door neighbor to ask her about finding a counselor for him and in the process I became completely unglued. My last 2 grandparents had died, both of my in-laws had died, my father had died, and my son had written a suicide note.

And I broke.

My neighbor asked me to let her take me to the emergency room. Husband was two hours away, at a job site. Mom was two hours away, at her home. I didn’t know what to do, and I couldn’t stop crying. So we went to the hospital. I walked in the emergency room door and the first person I saw, the volunteer working the sign-in desk, was a man from our church. A man who has, and continues to remind me of Daddy. I knew I was in the right place. I spent the afternoon in the ER. Bill, the man from church, came and checked on me several times. My friend Lori, the Parish Nurse from our church, came. (Yes, I belong to a Baptist church w/ a Parish Nurse on staff. Interesting, huh?) My neighbor brought me a teddy bear that travels with me whenever I go on trips now. My husband met the kids at home and took care of them, and we all decided that I should probably stay in the psych hospital.

Only there were no beds available.

So my neighbor had to take me to another hospital in a larger city. I was checked in about midnight, went through a modified strip search, had all of my belongings searched for anything I could use to hurt myself, like the string from my sweatpants. I was allowed to keep the teddy bear, some paper and a pen. I spent the next 3 days at that hospital, and was released on Thanksgiving Day. My mom had taken the kids to her house, so husband and I spent the day doing nothing, just trying to understand what had happened and maybe what was going to happen next.

Now it’s 3 years later, and we’re still trying to understand what’s going to happen next. I don’t work any more, and know that I will never be able to work at the technical level I did before all of this happened. There was long term disability income, but only for 24 months so it’s gone now. We’re trying to stay afloat while a lawyer and the Social Security Administration try to decide what to do with me. There are things that have happened during these past 3 years that I have been able to experience only because of being broken. Good things. Other peoples’ lives that have been changed, for the better, because I was broken. Things can never be the way they were, and I wouldn’t want them to be.

Last night we watched the movie “Evan Almighty”. I remember when “Bruce Almighty” came out, and I saw the trailer for it and thought it would be blasphemous and swore I’d never see it. Then husband and son saw it at the $2.00 theater, and husband told me about it. Yes, it’s childish and silly and vulgar at times, but I like it. “Evan” was milder than “Bruce” and I like it better. The scene where God talks to Evan’s wife in the restaurant resonated with me. If you pray for patience, does God give you patience, or the opportunity to practice patience? If you pray for courage, does God give you courage, or the opportunity to be courageous? If you pray for a closer family….well, you get the idea.

So, what opportunities have made themselves known during these past 5 years? Patience? Yes. Courage? Yes. Togetherness? Yes. Trust? Most definitely, yes.

But I think the biggest opportunity has been…to be thankful for what we have and who we have in our lives.

Because tomorrow something or someone I thought I had might not be here.

It’s the opportunity to be thankful for……today.

Yep, it’s Thanksgiving again. And to those who are part of this life I have, I say “Thanks.”

Blessed BE.

C.