"You said every road is a good road, between your next road and your last road. Every love is your best love, and every love is your last love..and every kiss is a goodbye...."
Songs:Ohia - Coxcomb Red
As I walked out of work tonight, I was keenly aware of the recent time change. It was only 5:00 but the sky was dark as late night. The birds were silent and the night crickets chirped. I could not see their colors, but the Fall leaves crunched beneath my feet. Seasons had changed.
I drove home, past two neighborhoods where I have lived just in this year and then into the third neighborhood where I live now. I realized once again that I move a lot. I drove past the homeless men under the bridge and in front of the free clinic, settled in for the night where I see them every night and every single morning and realized that they are a constant in my life.
I have been noticing these constants a lot lately...or should I say since a recent health scare that left me briefly paralyzed on the left side of my body. I've had to reevaluate a lot of things since then...one moment I was sitting in my office chair and the next minute, I was surrounded by a team of paramedics who were showing my bra to my boss. When you go to work in the morning, you just never expect that to happen. ( Trust me folks, what they say is true - make sure you are always wearing your good underwear.)
And people have asked me what thoughts went through my mind when it happened. Did I wonder if I was going to die? Did I wonder if I would ever be able to walk again? Did I see my entire life flash in front of me with every bad hair style choice like a slide show? I'd like to say that I did...but I didn't. The thing that was foremost on my mind was the fact that I had left my closet in a mess that morning and that I didn't want my family to come up and see it like that. I know, you may be thinking that this is funny or absurd. To be honest with you, I have been thinking the same thing. I have also been thinking that it's time to reevaluate.
When it's my time to go, I don't want to be worried about the pile of clothes in my closet or whether the litter box has been cleaned or even how many car payments I have left. I've vowed to start living my life like at any moment, I could be hooked up to tubes and machines again in the back of an ambulance, inhaling man-made oxygen. Okay, let me qualify this by saying that I'm not one of those sappy people who thinks that you can just walk out of a hospital and decide to start a new life, skipping along without a care in the world, only to stop to help elderly people across the street, find lost pets or to try out the new Baskin Robbins ice cream flavor. I know that when it comes to teaching old dogs new tricks, I'm going to be a slow, hard sell. You see, some people are "glass half full" people and some people are "glass half empty" people. I, my dears, am one of those "where did the other half of that glass of milk go and do I need to clean it up before it starts to smell funny?" people.
I'm more of a list maker than a risk taker. This said, I've been making a list in my mind of why I am lucky. Of why I had better start doing what I was put here for (or finding out what I was put here for). So far, the list has started as such:
I've been blessed in my life. I have a family who is extremely loving and extremely hilarious. They fill my Christmas holidays full of gag gifts and curious finger foods and my July birthdays full of steaming-too-hot-for-Southern-weather pots of vegetable soup, with the air conditioning turned up. They send me mix CD's, money and grocery gift cards in the mail and put up a pretty good fight when I vow to pay them back. They send me e-mail photos of their sunrises and sunsets and recent thrift store treasures so that I can feel like I am there with them. I often can feel that I came from them and it makes me glad.
I have a close-knit group of friends who even though we are mostly absent in each other's lives, still seem to sustain each other with words of encouragement and funny stories. One calls me "sweetie" and giggles over long distance phone lines until we snort, and tells me when I'm making bad choices and pretends to listen when I tell her of hers. One writes words that leave me numb and is more powerful than he knows and is the very reason that I still long to be a writer when I grow up. One rug pacer calls me his "sister" and it makes me proud and sometimes rivals even me in stubborn ways. Another calls me, "Sunshine" and makes me beam and roll in the floor with clever e-mail signatures. Another makes me giggle with his blood-lust for IKEA and the fact that he owns the fabled air freshener can with the penis hidden by a surely-fired ad designer on the flowery label. Still another friend, kept me sane at one of the most insane jobs of my life.
There's my friend who sends me photo after photo, making me envious of his talent but reminding me that I also have the drive deep down inside to photograph everything that I see as well. He collects found photographs right along with me and makes me sometimes feel like we are starting whole new families with found paper relics. Each Spring, I put daffodils in the vase that he gave me and cross my heart that he I and are going to make it without becoming hard hearted. I feel certain that we won't. I have a friend who since he has been gone, makes the honky tonks and lamp stores look dull and uninteresting. There's my friend who I watch trying to find happiness, and I know that he will. Thanks to him and his fabulous taste, my kitchen is decorated with Hulk's and plastic hillbillies, just like a girl needs. I have a friend who doesn't know how powerful her encouraging words are to me across the miles. Though we have only met once, she makes me feel that it is okay to be human and to want more. There's my friend who will do Waffle Houses with me and cooks me meatballs and lets me call him "grandma" and the other friend who makes me feel like a part of her family through across town e-mails. Then another who keeps me up to date on politics and rural, back road signs and characters and makes me miss such things now that I'm not near them.
I have a sweetheart who answers his Halloween red-lit front door bathed in stage blood and holding a fake horse head, and for once I feel understood and I give him a hug in my equally blood covered white pleated skirt and ponytail. He thirsts for roadside attractions with me and likes me best without makeup and will sing in an operatic voice along with 78's. He lets me give input on how to decorate his house and doesn't call me tacky when I overemphasize the words "mid century modern" like a snob. He goes grocery shopping with me and doesn't make fun of my choices out loud (Little Debbie is my number one homegirl) or make me eat big hunks of tofu or sushi. He introduces me to new music and old music and has never once made fun of the tin pan alley songs that I butcher when I think that nobody can hear. He serenades me with musical saws and makes me feel loved every single day - and lucky.
Okay, yes...this is getting sappy. I started to apologize for it, but then I realized that it's time to change my tune. If I die tomorrow in sort of freak accident (I predict getting run over while running to catch an ice cream truck or maybe even smothering to death while trying to dive into a bin of old clothing at the Salvation Army), I want it to be said that even though I am a stresser, a list maker and a worry wart, I still know which side my bread is buttered on and that I realize how good I have it.
On that drive home tonight in the seasonal dark, I started thinking as I usually do about all of the things that I needed to do when I got home. Then, I stopped midstream and bought a huge sweet tea that reminds me of my South Carolina home and long, leisurely meals there with family and laughter and plenty of refills. On the rest of the drive, I thought about my late grandparents and remembered a photograph that I had of them. That photograph always made me smile, and I couldn't remember where it was. I hadn't seen it in ages. In the photograph, my grandmother was sitting on my grandfather's lap and they were laughing so hard that both of their faces were as red as beets. She had her arm around his neck and he was smiling up at her. Her eyes were closed in laughter.
It's impossible for me to even think of that photo without smiling. It was taken in a time before she had her strokes and grew frail and the Alzheimers erased her stories and songs, and before he grew terribly sick and thin and passed away from cancer, even though he had the mind and heart as fresh as a child. I have no idea as to what they were laughing at in that photo, but it's just easy to tell that they were living in the moment without a care in the world.
I came home and decided that even though I had a to-do list as long as my arm, I wanted to find that photograph. I hauled all of the boxes out of my storage closet with curious cats leaping between them and sat before the massive Rubbermaid bin containing every photo that I have owned in my life. Decades and decades of photographs. Some from my life and some that were passed down to me. I began to sort through them, one by one. At first, I was frenzied, only wanting to quickly find that one photograph so that I could get on with my house cleaning and other nightly chores. Then, with a little tuxedo kitty poking her head out of a box beside me, I began to laugh and lighten up a little. I got up and put on a record and sat back against the wall and looked at each photo - REALLY looked at them - at the people in the photos, at their faces and their gestures. At the scenes and backdrops in the photos, some that I had seen before and some that I had not. I revisted the people in each one, many of whom have passed on or who I never get to see anymore. It was wonderful to get lost in the scenes in each photograph, to stand in front of that tinsel Christmas tree with my great aunts in their crinolines, wonder at my mom's perfectly coifed 60's hairstyles or to lean against the shiny hotrod with my baby-faced dad...and even to revisit highschool loves who for some reason were able to "love" me with an 80's poodle perm . I revisited houses where I have lived and towns too.
It was near the very bottom that I found the photo of my laughing grandparents. I knew that it would be that way but didn't worry about the time that it would take to get there. Philosophers would mock my comparison of a Rubbermaid bin full of photographs to this life that we struggle through, but in my late evening mind, it makes all the sense in the world.
I put the photos away and pinned the photo of my grandparents to my refrigerator. I grabbed a huge roll of toilet paper and encouraged a couple of usually-discouraged-to-make-messes cats to chase me through the house, as the paper was shred into confetti to be vacuumed up later. Their eyes were open wide as saucers and so were mine. I didn't reach for the vacuum.
I'd like to raise a sweet tea toast to my grandparents who still live on in my memory and old Kodak paper photographs, showing me that even after the bad times and sometimes before them, it's the good times that we'll remember in the end if we play our cards right.
