1. I started out my day on Saturday by heading out to the Waffle House in Dumfries, thinking it was close to the blood drive I’d signed up for. Two things wrong with that. The first is that I should have checked. It was not. It took me an hour to get from the restaurant to the hospital. I figured since the address was near Dulles Airport, I was golden. And, in fact, that wasn’t my only dumbass attack that day. I was getting a Gatorade and a water bottle at 7-Eleven before going to said Waffle House and locked my keys in my car. I’d taken my debit card out of my backpack, and accidentally dropped my keys in, along with my wallet, and closed the door behind me. I have a plastic key in my wallet in case I get locked out, therefore my key and my backup key were both as useful as a spork on a ribeye. All the time I would have spent stuffing my face with waffles and bacon was lost as I went to find a mechanic to bail me out. He arrives, has a hell of a time getting the door open, and about 15 minutes go by before he realizes the hatchback is unlocked. I have no idea why. I’ve needed a certain key for it since I got the car- copies won’t work, and it has never been unlocked in the history of the time I’ve owned it. The only thing I can think of is that I might have loosened the locking mechanism with a wire hanger, because I did try the hatchback before I ran to get the mechanic. The only good part was that when he discovered that my car was unlocked, he gave me half my money back.
2. I got to the blood drive 45 minutes after my scheduled appointment, having signed up to donate whole blood. But then an idea came to me. I said, “do you have more need for whole blood or for platelets?” They said, “oh my God… bless you… we have WAY more need for platelets.” So, I get all the testing done and my iron is too low. Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick. I should have known. I haven’t had any red meat in ages and it’s the second day of my period. I mean, come on. Who doesn’t know that? Despite not actually having given anything, I’m still eligible for a t-shirt and a Redskins game ticket. I chose Redskins vs. Vikings for nefarious reasons. I already have a Vikings jersey (Chris Kluwe, who is a punter, but when people ask me what position he plays, I say “blogger“). By the time I got there, Santana Moss was already gone, so that autograph was down the drain, even though I brought a Sharpie for my t-shirt.
3. I’d heard about Munch ice cream from a newspaper article… I think it was in the Washington Post, but I’ve slept since then. It’s in Annandale at a collection of indoor food carts at The Block. I figured since I don’t get across the river that often, I might as well go there and check it out. I got a pork belly bánh mì at Balo Kitchen, complete with french fries, which did not leave me any room for dessert…. however, being full has never stopped me from eating dessert before. At Munch, I got a blueberry earl grey ice cream sandwich, which they make by putting the hard packed ice cream on a donut and running it quickly through a panini press. Then, they top it with condensed milk and your choice of cereal. I said I wanted fruity pebbles, but I got frosted flakes. Close enough. It was delicious…. and if that weren’t enough of a good time, the University of Houston football game was on a projection screen in front of me. Since I am only 5’2, I’m pretty sure the players were bigger than me, wrapped in their “redvolution” glory. I didn’t stay for the whole game, but I should have. I was in such a food coma that I almost fell asleep at a red light…. and this was after the world’s largest Diet Coke. Maybe I should have ordered coffee with dessert. Life lessons for next time, because Munch is only the greatest and best excuse for crossing the river in the entire world…. Next to selflessly giving blood, of course… selfless… yeah, that’s right :::wearing free t-shirt and looking forward to a Vikings win:::

Today I went to the mall for some much needed time with friends. Well, not exactly friends, but people I see over and over when I go out. First, I got a haircut from my favorite hairdresser. Then, I went to my local Irish pub. A black bean burger, Shock Top, ice water, and ten unanswered Redskins points later (can I get an amen because THAT doesn’t happen often), it was time to come home. Now I wish I had stayed for the whole game, but hindsight is 20/20.

The funniest thing that happened to me today is that when I got my hair cut, I saw the cover of GQ and this guy had the best haircut on the front. I got through the wash, blowdry, and style before I realized that it was Robert Pattinson. So I feel I have to explain to my hairdresser that I’m not a Twilight fan, I just love the haircut blah blah blah because when I realized who it was, I just sat there and blushed until my toes turned red. A burger and a beer was in order after that one, even though my hair turned out ridiculously cute.

The bartender and I have become somewhat chummy, and I feel like it’s “my place.” He treats me well regardless of whether I order alcohol or not…. probably because I’m a good tipper. 😉 Though he is black, wears glasses, and has shaved his head, he still reminds me of Lars from Steven Universe because he has the same big ear spacers that Lars has. Totally cute and nerdy, and he has the personality to match. I was watching the game and nerding out over food and drinks with him at the same time. I’m not a huge football fan, but thanks to Dana and Friday Night Lights, I know most of the rules and more about the players themselves than I know about the game (I support the #rethink #rename campaign, but I’m not going to abandon “my team” while they work that shit out). “My team” is in quotation marks because when I married Dana, I knew as much about football as a bag of hammers… also, if you live here, you can root for the Redskins, or you can move. There is no in-between.). As an aside, I told the bartender about Irish margaritas (Bushmills rather than tequila), and he told me he’d try it and maybe put it on the menu as a drink special.

The guy next to me ordered a Smithwick’s, and all of the sudden I was transported back in time to when I came up with the recipe for Lanagan’s Pub Chili at Biddy McGraw’s (Now the O’Neill Pub in Portland, OR). It’s my one legacy… if it’s a) still on the menu 2) still called that. But at least back then, my name was on the menu. I don’t think it would have worked out so well for me if my last name had been Jones.

I ended up at the mall because the International Spy Museum was about to close up shop for the day. I’d originally planned to go there because I got an e-mail from them saying that their Argo @#%& Yourself t-shirts with the museum logo on the sleeve were on sale for ten bucks, and I had leftover birthday money to spend. It’s been my favorite movie since Jesus was a boy… or at least, since the movie came out (you can teach a rhesus monkey how to direct in a day). I was forced to buy the Blu-Ray back in the day because Ben Affleck was on the Today show talking about how, since Blu-Rays hold 50 GB of information, they were able to load it with information about the real people involved, and along with the INCREDIBLE, NERVE-WRACKING DRAMA from the Argo Main Theme to Clearing Iranian Airspace, incredibly funny (brace yourself… it’s like talking to those two old fucks on The Muppets)(Jack: It is my duty to inform you that if you get caught, the Agency will not claim you. Tony: I should have brought some books for prison. Jack: Don’t worry- they’ll kill you long before prison. [Paraphrased… my memory is compromised in my elder years]).

The reason I want to go to the Spy Museum shop rather than ordering it from their web site is that even though I live rather close to the museum, the shipping is still outrageous… about 70% of the cost of the shirt. That is a Grey’s Anatomy “SERIOUSLY?” if ever I heard it. Today was just not that day.

Today was football and a sparkly vampire haircut.

The week before my birthday, Dan took me out to dinner and I took her out for dessert. On Friday, I went to both lunch and dinner with friends, and to the zoo in the middle. Therefore, on my actual birthday, I spent the day responding to Facebook notifications and going “off the grid” just to read and relax.

And then donations started pouring in, and I cried for the love of them.

A few years ago, I was having a horrible day at work. A case came across my desk and I dialed the number (I was working as tech support back then, so basically I thought I was calling to help them). A woman picks up and says, Doctors Without Borders! My heart dropped into my stomach as I realized what a selfish git I was being- only focusing on what was going wrong with me and not seeing the forest for the trees. I was safe inside a terribly cold office in 105 degree heat outside. Whatever was going wrong in my life, it didn’t include medical supply outages or the fear of accidentally getting bombed in a war zone.

Since then, I set up my Amazon account to donate to DWB every time I made a purchase.

Now, Facebook has this thing where you can donate your birthday to the organization of your choice. Doctors Without Borders was one of them, and I was able to raise $260 for what I believe is one of the best organizations on earth.

It was such a relief that I was able to get away from my fastidious navel-gazing ways and do something for others. Writers are notoriously introspective, often missing the world around them. I am glad I didn’t miss this opportunity to stop.

Thank you to all who donated- for their sakes, and for mine.

So happy to say that I am spending my birthday week with friends, and in one case, meeting someone new offline that I’ve been chatting with on. As I have said before, I am now averse to the all-online relationship having been both burned in some ways and set myself on fire in others.

Tonight is dinner with my precious Dan, invaluable to me on so many levels. She’s cute and funny in a way that’s infectious, and we’re also able to have next-level conversations because she’s one of the few friends I have that has also lost her mother. It’s not that I don’t value friends who still have them, it’s that a parent’s death is a certain ocean into which you’ve been dumped…. one in which people don’t learn to swim until they’ve been dumped as well…. and at first, you’re so far under you can’t even see the waves.

It’s taken me a long time to stop feeling a little bit bitter towards my friends who are much older than me and still have their parents, as if the slight was personal. Logically, you know it’s not. But emotion is often inversely proportional. My logic is right side up, while my emotions are upside down and backwards. It’s been making those two things slowly come into alignment that’s made me feel better.

There are only five days left in my 39th year, and then I will face my first birthday without my mother there to tell me the story of how I was born at 9:59 AM, which she did faithfully every year no matter what time zone I was in. I’m also not going to get a Peter Pan or Mickey Mouse cake, and now I am absolutely sobbing as I write this. Now I just want my mommy, and I haven’t felt this small in ages. It’s a good thing I can touch type, because I can still get emotions out when my eyes are closed. My fingers fly over the keys as easily as she played the piano.

And trust me, writing that in the past tense rips my guts out.

I am so glad I am seeing Dan tonight. I just want to be held by someone who knows, you know?

I have to remind myself that it’s a happy thing to have a birthday. I have never pictured myself as a 40-year-old, but I’m about to find out what it’s like. If there’s anything I’m hoping to gain, which I already have in some cases, it’s the ability to see what’s important and what’s not. Hurricane Harvey was a great reminder that having food, water, and shelter is a blessing in and of itself…. especially since my family is right in the middle of reconstruction afterward.

They were not flooded, but they’re working to help others. My dad and stepmom are medics on a church team. My sister took a temp job with the City of Houston organizing the relief effort at the George R. Brown Convention Center (she’s back at her “real job” today). It’s a very helpless place that my friends and family are all helping with relief and I’m sitting here high and dry…. although it’s not impossible to imagine Silver Spring flooding during Hurricane Irma, just unlikely due to its current course. If the unthinkable does happen, though, I will be the first to put on a mask and hang drywall.

Thanks to UMArmy, I do have a bit of experience in house-building and repair. I’ve tiled and put flashing on a roof, I’ve glazed windows, and I sort of know my way around a hammer and nails. It’s difficult for me in terms of being able to hit the nail straight on every time with monocular vision, but I do my best. I am not the most skilled “handyma’am” out there, but I am definitely enthusiastic.

I am glad that focusing on hurricane relief efforts in this entry has led me away from sobbing onto my t-shirt, but the devastation in Texas is just as tear-worthy. Again, watching it from afar is a very helpless place, as I’m sure some of you feel, as well. There are so many “Tex-patriots” out there, and I have met SO many in both DC and Portland. There seems to be some sort of unspoken rule that if you went to UT Law, you end up here. 😛

Look at that… a smile.

One thing I hope my 40th birthday brings is the ability to smile more. For the last two to three years, finding things to smile about has been difficult at best. Both Dana and I had our hearts ripped out upon finding that we weren’t as compatible as we thought…. and I am somewhat guilty about how long it’s taken me to move on. But grief has its own timeline, and I shouldn’t fault myself that it hasn’t been linear, or in fact, made any damn sense at all. I suppose the one thing that has made sense is that I needed a large grieving period due to how much we shared in the seemingly infinite number of years we knew each other.

I still remember being creeped out that she was serving lamb for Easter dinner… as if we were roasting Jesus over the coals… and made the joke that the day after Easter we could have leftover Jesus sandwiches. I think I made both Bamberger girls choke with that one.  Wordplay is pretty much the only service writers offer, so take it while you can get it, okkkkkkk……

That Easter was the first time we’d ever gotten together, and my advice to my younger self has always been, and still will be, when Dana invites you to Easter dinner, go. Because of course I was terrified of hanging out with someone I didn’t really know that well. Had I known how fantastic we were for each other at that time in our lives, I wouldn’t have hesitated.

I can only hope that someday, another one of my friendships will catch me off-guard and I’ll get butterflies in my stomach the same way (but not with Dan- she’s old and married and I’m just old [I may catch hell for that one because she’s quite a bit younger than me- I love you, Dan. You complete me.]).

What is it about writing that can allow me to go from sobbing at a paragraph to laughing at another? I’ll never know, but it works. Because of course, at “you complete me,” I lost it laughing about “Dorothy Boyd…. and THIS FISH.”

And on that note, it’s time go shower and get ready for dinner. In the words of an old friend, I thought, ‘what’s that smell?’ Ohhhhhhhhh, it’s meeeeeee…..

 

It’s 11:24, so this will be short. I need to get it posted before midnight. My niece, Hannah Alexis, was born today. She is Wi-Phi’s  (William Philip’s) younger sister, and gets no less nerdy of a nickname. I call her “Hannah Solo.”

As you can imagine, I am wild-eyed with impatience at meeting her, but for now, she’ll just have to accept my presents in the mail- a Star Wars-themed onesie and a Washington Post, because the Houston Chronicle will not be printing anything for a while.

Hurricane Harvey is the main story in the Post, too, but luckily my family was not affected today. They were concerned that they were going to need to deliver Kelly at home, but the waters receded enough to get to Methodist Hospital in Sugar Land.

Although it is interesting to note that had it come to my sister delivering at home, she would have been fine. My dad took EMT I all the way through Paramedic II, so he’s delivered three babies.

No matter what, things would have turned out perfectly. Hannah sure did. She’s a screaming bundle of joy and it is such a relief to hear her cry loudly over the interwebs because Wi-Phi’s birth was so anxiety-laden. For those of you just joining us, he had to have heart surgery as soon as he was born. He is absolutely 100% perfect, but at the time prayer flowed through me like water, and I just had to hope that it was enough.

This birth was better than textbook. After one push, Hannah was here. “They” were even at the office until her water broke. I’m going to remind myself of that every time I get the sniffles and start to complain.

Virtual pink bubble gum cigars and champagne for everyone. I’m going to go look at my niece’s adoring face and see which of my features she got (this is a joke- her mother is my stepsister). If I have anything to do with it at all, maybe when she’s older she’ll have my smirk, because my dad will have taught it to her, just like he taught it to me.

Goodnight, sweet Hannah. Welcome to the world, baby girl. Let me read you to sleep.

In an old house in Paris
All covered with vines
Lived 12 little girls
In two straight lines….

-Ludwig Bemelmans, Madeline

 

 

So, off I go to Dollar Tree to get my few essentials for the week. I bought a lot of things to cook, but no snacks. I am hungry to the point of exhaustion, and need food RTFN. I notice that there is an authentic Mexican panaderia in the parking lot a few doors down, and think to myself that a piece of egg bread or a cookie will tide me over until supper.

I go into the panaderia and start ordering. I decide to get some stuff for breakfast, too, and then I realize I don’t have any cash. I say, “tomas tarjetas (you take cards)?” What I think the woman says is that we have a five dollar limit on cards. Oh, boy. Do you know how friggin’ hard it is to spend five dollars at a bakery? I think everything I ordered was 50 cents each, if that. When I get to what I think is five dollars, the woman says, “no, you have to have TEN dollars.”

Christ on a cracker.

I have already exhausted the number of conchas I can eat by about three dollars already. Conchas links to a Wikipedia article on sweet bread, and if you look at the list, I probably ordered at least one of each. Now we’re up to seven dollars.

Finally, I realize they have a cold case and get a large block of queso fresco. Why I didn’t think of this before is beyond me. It’s like, six dollars all by itself, and infinitely useful in just about everything.

My bread purchases take up, like, three bags, because not only did I buy sweet bread for breakfast for the next eight years, I also bought a few slices of cake and some cookies.

Who am I kidding? Nine years.

I get home and make some macaroni and cheese from the box, but I do it the way I was classically trained to do- mix the fat (I used margarine) with the cheese and flour to make a roux, then add milk. Once that was set, I added shreds of cheddar, salt-free seasoning, and the aforementioned queso fresco. The queso fresco does not melt all the way- it’s a very hard cheese and tastes comparable to Romano. The sauce and pasta mix together beautifully with these tiny chunks of cheese and it is heaven on earth.

And that’s when I realized I was out of Tupperware…. or rather, I’d bought four packages of Zip-Loc throwaways and they’d all been used up by my roommates. So, I put some in a Zip-Loc bag and ate the rest.

That was probably a mistake. I must have had like, four helpings. It was worth it, though.

Even if I am too full to eat ALL THAT BREAD.

I can remember only a handful of times in my life when I’ve literally had nothing to say…. moments where words just won’t even form, and pictures were moving too fast to grab on. This wedding is one of them.  Everything is swirling so fast I can’t grab on to a picture to describe it, and things come to me in bits and pieces, not fully formed thoughts. So today even though I want to decompress, you’ll have to wait over time for tiny details, because that’s how they’ll come to me, too.

I will say that the wedding went even better than rehearsal, and I was relieved, because you never rehearse the vows beforehand. Cory told me that I was easy and clear in terms of the repetition, which meant so much to me. The only mistake I made, which in my mind is hilarious enough to laugh about now, is that I accidentally told Bryn to say Cory’s name instead of her own. Luckily, she caught it. I said, “well, you might want to say your own name…” We laughed, and moved on. That’s it. That’s the sum total of dumbass attacks on my part this trip. I had a script, and I stuck to it, most of the time without looking up, because I wasn’t the focus. They were. To do anything to take focus away from them and put it on to me was unwelcome in my eyes. I hope that I was able to be heard in the back, but even if I wasn’t, there’s only two people in the world that had to hear what I was saying.

It’s like there’s this secret between the three of us, that only the three of us know how much significance to put on that memory. For those few minutes while they were taking their vows, we were the only three people in the room (well, the outdoors, anyway). I am very glad that I came early and spent time with Cory before the wedding, because I wanted to know whether he was the guy that was capable of marrying someone like Bryn, and I say that with stardust in my eyes… she’s not a person, she’s an event. When Bryn asked me if I’d do the wedding, my first thought was oh God no…. but that was because at that moment all I saw were pigtail braids. She was obviously way too young to get married. As the pictures in my mind of her aged up, so did my response.

Luckily, Cory turned out to be every bit the man she promised, and I was happy to do the ceremony. It would have been awkward if I’d objected, so I am really glad I never had to… he’s just amazing. He had to find out whether I was for real, too. He was nervous about getting a friend to do the wedding he’d never met, because the stereotypical “my friend’s doing the wedding” usually means that it’s unprofessional and lacks legitimacy. He told me that he didn’t know how seriously I would take it. I did, though. Meaning I did take it seriously AND that I knew how solemn an occasion it would be for both of them ahead of time, and to hold on to that feeling.

The only thing I wish I had practiced was my handwriting. Their marriage certificate certainly wasn’t made any more beautiful by my carpal tunnel pile of garbage.

I did, however, manage to get it “write” on the one line that mattered.

Signature. Of. Officiant.

 

Last night was the rehearsal dinner, which went marvelously because blocking was one less thing I had to worry about. The wedding planner had it covered. Standing next to the groom while waiting for everyone to file in was an amazing feeling…. as if a part of me was on the ground, and a part of me was floating above, recording it for posterity.

The weather was clear and cool as we all did our parts to make everything flow smoothly tomorrow. But even if it doesn’t, it will still be all right. A wedding is an event that has its own flow, and you just step into it, and kick with the speed of the current. A dog is going to bark, a baby is going to cry, an anything could turn into a thing. To fight it is to court disaster.

It seemed to be over before it began, even though we ran the service several times. I didn’t say much of what I was going to say tomorrow, because I wanted everyone in the wedding party to go to the wedding, too…. it also kept people from wasting their time when we could be eating chips and dip.

I’m just going to have to mind my robe. It’s a bit long, and I don’t want to fall into the bride and groom at any point. It would be mortifying, but over time, I’d joke about it, too. I just have my mom in my head telling me to be careful.

Speaking of my mom, I’m using her old suitcase and I found one of her ponytail holders in it while I was packing. It’s around my wrist, under my watch. She’s with me in spirit.

As is a small piece of Argo, because I remembered a conversation we had in which we talked about going to the coast, and the subject came up elsewhere. It’s like all of my losses are becoming the rocks under me as opposed to over, because thinking of them and wishing them good things is lifting me up from what was once an enormous well with weights holding me under.

Taking time in the desert, wandering toward my path rather than away from it, was just the thing I needed to do to feel this healed, remembering everything through fondness and not enmity. My world crashed and burned around me, but it has been an impetus to build something stronger in the ruins.

When it is over, this wedding will become a part of my self-confidence that I’m moving in the right direction and not the wrong one. We get few signs we can see from God and point to them as moments, but this will be one of them.

I know. I rehearsed it.

I can honestly say that I feel incomplete without Dana while walking through Portland, especially with a family we both know and love. She is my phantom limb, because everywhere I look, a story runs through my mind, this seemingly-eternal conversation because when we talked, it was always a tennis or bowling match. We took turns with our favorite details, or one of us would set it up and the other would knock it down. We had a knack for comedy, an innate sense of who got the punchline because it sounded better in that woman’s voice.

Being Southern, we also never let the facts get in the way of a good story…. in the words of Armistead Maupin, jeweling the elephant. Details over the years began inflating… you know, like in a fishing trip where you catch an enormous fish and after ten years, you say that it was 10 or 20 pounds heavier? But it would only happen in the interest of making people laugh harder.

I also think about her a lot because hello… I’m officiating a wedding. I really had an aversion to a big wedding to her, and not because I haven’t dreamed of a pipe organ, brass section, and full choir since I was a teenager. It’s because while I don’t think this all the time, it is the place where I was the most internally homophobic. It was what if we planned a wedding, and they laughed at us or wouldn’t come? And, of course, I never really figured out who “they” were. I hate myself for thinking that way, but when Kathleen and I got married, you cannot believe how relieved I was that only my dad and my sister were with me. Barely a whisper, and incredibly meaningful. The only reason that my mom wasn’t there is it was a Sunday after church and she had her own church job. My mom might not have been as on board with the whole gay thing as I would have liked, but that would never have gotten in the way of attending a moment that important in my life. She would have recognized it wasn’t about her.

I think that as I began to wrap my brain around it, I would have been excited and giggly. It was being utterly caught off-guard by Dana talking to our priest about it without talking to me first. I know Dana well enough to know that it was just as spontaneous on her end, because we don’t plan things in advance. We’re both attracted to whim. We’re ADHD, so it’s one of the things we do best. I know for a fact that she did not mean to hurt me, and definitely didn’t know my thoughts & fears on the matter. What I learned about marriage was in the years we were together, not a ceremony. I learned by breathing it…. hour by hour by hour….. year by year.

Part of what happens with divorce is that you’re not only grieving backward, you’re grieving forward. A rock sits on my chest when I think of all we gave up. There were excellent reasons for it, but those reasons do not come with any kind of pain relief or inflammation reduction. If only acetaminophen and ibuprofen could handle emotions. For now, the best it gets is Klonopin, where it doesn’t stop my mind, but stops the physical reactions, like cortisol levels going through the roof, racing blood pressure and heartbeat, and being buried under all the lost jokes, all the lost laughter, all the best parts of knowing someone as if they are part of you.

I grieve the part of myself that died, because I am no longer the person I was with when I was with her and lose it when I pretend/predict how we would have grown. Tennis matches that would have added to our collection. But this grief, just like all my others, doesn’t go away. I just change in my reactions to it. Sometimes it feels like movies play in my head in the stories that might have happened, and I smile because they’re just as funny as when we were together. I just judge myself on how close I got the essence of our humor in my head. Like knowing after seven years and change of being married how close I got in what I think her  response would be…. but never when I’m sad. Only when I am thinking about the Laurel and Hardy we became. When my mind divides itself and I’m both sides of the conversation, she’s still funnier than me. I am proud of myself for getting to the point that what she would think of x or y is no longer my first reaction.

I have pushed it down to third or fourth. Progress.

We’ve worked together and lived together, so there are very few experiences I have that there isn’t a joke between us, so the new memory connects to the old and my mind drifts, saying her punchline.

The difference for me is now when I think of her, I only remember her hilarity and nothing about the, ummm, unpleasantness. Because first I lost my best friend in the world, and I never mistake the part for the whole.

 

I just saw the most disturbing scene of my whole life, and I hope never to repeat it.

It was shopping day. I went to a repair shop and got my “dress up” Mickey Mouse watch I’ve been meaning to fix for three years patched up. I got my old glasses fixed at the place where I got my new glasses that won’t be ready for two weeks so I’m not blind my whole “vacation.” I went to Dollar Tree and got enough food to last me a few days, including mini chocolate bars and bubble gum for the plane… disappointed they didn’t have the smoothie packs I use every morning… If I’m not allowed through security with mini chocolate bars, TSA can have some fun on me.

So, after this incredible feeling of “I’m gettin’ shit handled,” I’m driving home, cruising down University and slowing down for a red light. All of the sudden, a young Indian woman starts running across the street between cars, about 100 feet behind the crosswalk- against the green turn light- and is bulldozed over by a car that was going toward the left turn lane.

Luckily, she was just hit by the front of the car and the tires did not run over her body. She was able to get up and walk to the median, as people start running from the far side of the street to help her. Someone runs up to the car that hit her to make sure he doesn’t get away, and my light was green before I got to see whether he just rolled up his window and drove off, or whether he actually turned around to call the police.

I’ve heard of people getting hit by cars my whole life, but this is the first time I’ve actually seen it happen. In the state of Maryland, the driver has, at best, only partial responsibility for the accident because he hit a jaywalker. The law says that the driver only need pay medical bills, etc., if he or she was the cause of the accident. I just hope the driver was a good Samaritan and waited until the police and ambulance arrived.

I was terrified for the girl, because whether it was her fault or not, it was excruciating to watch. She was carrying lots of stuff, and, on impact, dropped all of it. In skiing, we call that a “yard sale,” and the description was apt in this case as well. Hair ties, her hat, and her shopping bags all crashed to the ground, and the contents spilled into several lanes.

Possibly for the first time in my life, I got intense road rage, because all these people are picking up stuff in front of my car and the cars behind me are honking at me to go. I suppose I can’t really be mad- they weren’t aware of what had just happened and couldn’t see the pedestrians in front of me. Wait, that’s not true at all. The car behind me must have seen what happened, and was still just a giant dickhead to me.

Surely they could’ve seen that a full-size sedan did not have enough feet in front of him to brake to a full stop as the girl was running, trying to make it before my light turned green.

In the nanosecond after the accident, I wondered if she was dead. It took her a minute to get up, and I audibly sighed with relief. I’ve never been hit by that many pounds of metal, so it was shocking in a good way to see that she didn’t seem permanently injured…. although it’s probably too early to tell. She may have been walking on adrenaline and imagination, and could conceivably have a brain bleed as well.

It’s hard when you see something like that and say to yourself, “she should have known better,” because you know you’ve let your judgment impede your compassion, at least for a second…. It was hard to tell how old she was, though. She could have been anywhere from 15-30. Perhaps she was just naive, and perhaps she was distracted by seeing people she knew on the other side of the street. Whatever it was, I am sure that we will both be mindful of properly using crosswalks from now on.

I have to admit that when I bought a ticket to go see the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs play the Sugar Land Skeeters, it was a circuitous route. Apparently, there is a new baseball team in Portland called “The Pickles,” and because I knew I wouldn’t be in Portland long enough to see a game, I wondered if they would come east.  They, in fact, will not. It’s not even the same league. So, I’m looking through the Blue Crabs’ schedule and notice that my home town team (though put in long after I left) is going to be in Maryland the weekend after I get home from Bryn’s wedding. The ticket was less than $20 ($13 plus all the fees they seem to make up), a great price to see my two of my three favorite states duke it out.

For those that are unfamiliar with the area, Sugar Land is a suburb of Houston to the southwest, in one of the country’s fastest growing counties, Fort Bend. It’s called “Sugar Land” because it was the home of the original Imperial sugar factory. My family moved there the summer before I started 11th grade, and I ended up going to school there for a not so small reason- Houston traffic. The rule that you had to live in HISD to attend HSPVA was put in action when I was in 10th grade, so I was grandfathered in if I wanted to stay. However, the thought of commuting 45 minutes (more if the traffic was bad) to school seemed daunting since I’d just gotten my driver’s license.

It was not a small decision to switch schools, because back then I didn’t know that the symphonic band at Clements was actually better than the one I was currently in. They didn’t have a jazz band, so I auditioned for choir, instead. My two claims to fame from those years are that I was the first student to be in the top band and the top choir at the same time, and the first student to be openly gay.

I didn’t know that I was the first to be out, though. I learned it when Lindsay was a freshman at Clements, the year I was a freshman in college. Apparently, there were a bunch of kids with rainbow ribbons on their backpacks and Lindsay asked them about it. She told me that they said, “we do it in honor of this kid, Leslie.” You could have knocked me over with a feather. In retrospect, I’m not sure I’ll ever do anything more important in my life than pave the way for others to be brave in a conservative Republican suburb.

During my 11th grade year, I went back into a very large closet and told no one, because in a magnet school like ‘PVA, none of my church friends and school friends crossed over (as if it wasn’t obvious just by looking at me….). My senior year, my dad left the ministry and all bets were off. I wore my pride rings every single day, I flirted with girls (one in particular), and to my surprise, no one thought anything of it. The reason I was so surprised is that HSPVA was a nightmare (this is a link to a paper I wrote my senior year about my time at ‘PVA) some days. On others, it was fine.

I owe Sugar Land a lot in terms of my growth and development, but not sure I owe it enough that I automatically believe the Skeeters should win. 😉