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. 😉

It’s a little before 1300, and I’ve already had a day and a half. I lost my glasses this morning, and somehow I knew I was going to find them with my shoes. I was, in fact, correct. I’d put them on my laptop’s side of the bed and they’d fallen off. I’m looking for them frantically when all of the sudden, I hear a crunch.

I got in touch with Zenni, and they’re sending me new frames and a tool to pop the lenses out of my old ones for free. But then I thought I might be able to get new glasses quicker at the local shop. So, I go and their next appointment is Wednesday at 3:00. I go ahead and make the appointment, because I need a spare pair, anyway, and I have vision insurance. I can only hope that they are better quality than Zenni… and probably will be, because I can try them on in the store, rather than having to guess. The keyhole bridge glasses I have kind of make me look like that guy you avoid because you think he might be a perv. Such a disappointment, because online they looked so cute and timeless. Instead, they take up my whole face. If my hair was really long, they might be acceptable. Right now I look like a Marine recruit without even meaning to…. my hairapist got a little scissor happy.

My hair grows fast, though, so I really don’t have anything to worry about. And I still have prescription sunglasses for driving. I’ll just have to look like a perv at night. God, doesn’t that sound appealing….

Despite my hair being that short, it actually is really cute on me, as long as my glasses are small & cute as well. At least I only have to wait 7-10 days to get them back. Though my appointment at my local shop isn’t far away, my lenses take a while to make (I’m guessing) because they’re prisms. It usually takes three or four weeks for me to get them online.

But the real anxiety was hearing the crunch under my feet and knowing I hadn’t stepped on recycling.

I have one last shot at getting glasses sooner, and I’m about to leave to go see if it works out. I had my eye exam at LensCrafters in the mall, and I think my prescription is valid. I just need to see if they’ll take my insurance for frames. This is not how I wanted to spend my day, but it’s a necessary evil.

When I said a prayer asking for relief from grief, I suppose I should have been more specific.

It seems as if there is no limit to the amount of grieving I can do, and it’s not for lack of wanting to stop. I listen to peppy music, I go for walks, I do everything I’ve been taught to change my mood, and yet, my mind still wanders back to the days I lost Dana, Argo, and my mother. No one ever dies conveniently, but it was a body blow to lose my mother when I was still so lost in the throes of grieving the loss of my wife and my friend, and in Dana’s case, both.

Dana was my best friend in the entire world the whole time we were together, but officially for almost four years before we admitted we were in love with each other and didn’t just love each other. The rumor mill started long before that, but when I met Dana and we first started hanging out, my heart had been marinated, grilled, and handed to me on a platter. I didn’t have room for that kind of love in my life, and a best friend fit the bill nicely. I didn’t realize until probably two years had gone by that I was stopping myself from dating because I’d rather hang out with her. There were too many things to explore, like hiking and endless amounts of Trivial Pursuit in every genus imaginable, and in various states of sobriety.

In terms of driving out The Gorge, we called it “hiking o’clock” and “beer-thirty.” McMenamin’s Edgefield was halfway between Portland and Multnomah Falls, so generally we’d stop there on the way home for a pint. Multnomah, though, was only our starting point because there was an easy parking lot. We’d start there, then end up

somewhere over Wahkeena Falls or Angel’s Rest. At Angel’s Rest, I laid down on the rock and Dana held onto my ankles as I tried to get the perfect shot, because the rock pointed downward at a steep angle… and I can’t remember how we came up with it or when, but it was repeated that day. The setup is either one of us having to call our fathers. “Steve (or David)? Dana (or Leslie) was bein’ a dumbass and got herself killed.” The colors in the photos I took that day aren’t nearly as rich as they were in person, because back in those days, camera phones took quick and dirty pictures, not semi-professional quality like they do now. Although I will say that for a two megapixel camera and 640×480 resolution, this shot isn’t terrible. You know why I don’t have a better one? That was the longest, shittiest hike I’ve been on to date, and I am reticent to do it again. First of all, from Multnomah Falls, it’s about a mile and a half to the trail head to go up to Angel’s Rest. Second of all, it’s about an 11 mile hike round trip. On the way back, it started raining cats and dogs. Soaked to the skin, we almost cried when we got back to the trail head and realized it was still another one and a half miles to the car.

But, no pain, no gain, right?

There are too many funny stories between Dana and me, but right now the ones on my mind are about taking pictures. The setup on the first is that you have to know Dana loves genealogy, and I, to put it succinctly, do not. To me, it’s kind of boring. I let my grandfathers do all the work and just listen when they’re done. Dana will do things like call up historical societies. She did so and found out that one of her ancestors was buried at Beth Israel cemetery in Portland. So I had this bright idea that we should go and take pictures of the headstones with a “light dusting of snow.”

I’m laughing so hard I can barely breathe now…

We start driving and I forget that SW Portland is at a much higher elevation than SE, and when we get there, we are fuckin’ KNEE DEEP. We pull up in front of the caretaker’s house and Dana rings the doorbell to see if he can help her locate her ancestor’s headstone. He says, “where were you four hours ago?” It’s starting to get dark and the snow is falling even harder.

Tears are starting to roll down my cheeks now.

She asks if he has a map, and he says, “not one that you can read.” Dana gets all indignant thinking he’s just being shitty to her and tells me as such when she gets back in the car. I said, “it’s probably because it’s in Hebrew.” A light dawns in her brain that we’re at BETH ISRAEL CEMETERY. We decide that it’s getting too dark to see anything, anyway, and start home. We end up having to pull off to the side of the road to CHAIN UP due to my brilliance. It was a nice idea, anyway.

Another of my brilliant ideas turned dumbass attack was in Sacramento, California. Counselor, Dana’s sister, lives there, and we’d gone to visit her and the parents. We used to have code words that meant “get me the hell out of here” when being with family became too much for either of us (introvert and ambivert that we are). I said the code words and off we went for a drive. I think we went to a liquor store because as the resident mixologist, I was usually the one that made drinks for everyone in the afternoon. On the way home, we saw this field of sunflowers, and I told Dana to stop the car. Since we were on the highway, she knew I’d found something I wanted to take a picture of…. something I did often. To Dana’s credit, she ALWAYS stopped…. and didn’t leave me there, not even once. 🙂

To get the highway out of the picture, I crawled down into the gulch and before I knew it, I was past my

ankles in mud. It didn’t bother me, because I’d learned early that if you wanted a great shot, sometimes you had to pay for it. How much did I pay, you ask? Well, once I was that deep in the mud, I couldn’t get back out. I tried everything I could to struggle upward, because I’d just gotten new running shoes fairly recently and they needed to last me for a while. After about ten minutes, I finally realized that the only way I was ever going to see Dana again was to untie them and try to get my feet out that way. I managed to successfully get my feet out, but when I reached down for my sneakers, they were stuck as if superglued. Dana saw me walking across the highway in my socks to the convenience store where she parked. I opened the door and she looked at me knowingly. “…but I got the shot,” I said. I can’t remember whether she said anything or just sighed. If she just sighed, I promise I knew exactly what she meant.

One of my birthday presents came early; it’s an American Giant rugby jacket… basically a hoodie without the hoodie part. I chose the rugby jacket over the hoodie because I, in short, wanted to. Yes, AG is known for “the perfect hoodie,” but I already have several and my Irish national team rugby jacket is on its last legs. Plus, the black puffy jacket I already own is also rugby style, so I won’t have the hood poking over it, which I have found in falls/winters past that it doesn’t look that great. I’m going to be wearing it a lot, what with the Maryland fanatical devotion to air conditioning and it’s supposed to be down into the 60’s tomorrow because of a HUGE storm that’s already here. Flash flooding is already happening, and I’m glad I got out early this AM to go to the pharmacy.

There are always people who think they can drive in this kind of weather without being able to see the street. That way, they drive into three feet deep water, hoping against hope that their little Ford Damnits survive… #dumbassattack

Getting home before the storm really picked up was a smart decision, because I can’t go without my medication. Withdrawal is nothing short of craptastic… headaches, nausea, chills, the WORKS. Oh, and I had to pick up some shampoo. So there’s that.

I also went to see Dunkirk a few nights ago, and though there’s not much character development, the cinematography is exactly what it feels like to have been there. It was as if there was a sand filter on the lens, adding to the tension. You’re literally on the edge of your seat with fear as people get shot, drown, pilots overhead making crash landings into the water and onto the beach. It’s sort of a summer blockbuster, but it feels more like a documentary, because it doesn’t seem like liberties are taken with the story. There’s no made-up romance, no fictional backstory. Just the horror of war, and plenty of it.

My favorite line in the whole thing comes from this exchange:

-Is it going to work?
-We’ll know in six hours.
-I thought the tides came every three hours.
–Well, it’s a good thing you’re Army and I’m Navy.

…and that’s pretty much all the comic relief you’ll get. Good luck. God bless.

Although I will tell you that I was way less terrified than in the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan… so there’s that.

Also reading several good books- the rest of the Jane Whitefield series and Al Franken’s new book, Giant of the Senate. All are fascinating in their own way. Jane is a guide who gets people off the grid. Al Franken is a guy that gets you fired up about saving the country.

Haven’t written for the blog since Sunday because I’m trying to flesh out Sarah Silverman from the time she blows chunks into the class fish tank. The book itself is called Fish Ralph, what her class calls her the rest of the year.

Other writers say to “write what you know.” I remember middle school. All of it. But Sarah is not a reflection of me, she’s her own person, and I like spending time with her.

Since I don’t have an agent, I may try to get it into Amazon on my own… but that’s putting the cart before the horse, because only Chapter One is complete.

It has a Harry Potter sort of arc, because even though it’s not fantasy, if the first book takes off, there is every bit the chance that the books will grow up as she does. But don’t think for a moment that her nickname will ever change. Kids don’t forget. Anything. I just don’t want to, again, put the cart before the horse and publish a complete series before I know if it resonates with people or not.

I write my blog for me. Novels, on the other hand, are, in an ideal world, supposed to make money.

Lindsay has been bugging me to work on this novel forever, because she genuinely wants to see what happens to Sarah. Now THAT is a compliment, my friends.

And on that note, Sarah is calling me. I better get back to her. You know how middle school kids are…..

Everything is starting to feel more and more real as my ticket to Portland is secured, my ordination papers have arrived, and in the next week or so, my wedding wear will be delivered as well. After checking with the bride, I chose a simple white monk’s robe with alb and cinctures (ropes that go around the waist rather than a stole). An alb on the robe means it’s basically a long, Catholic/Anglican hoodie. If you’re not married by someone in a hoodie in Portland, is it really a Portland wedding?

I also chose the clothes of an altar boy (basically) rather than a priest, because though the Church of the Latter Day Dude is legal, I don’t feel like I’m ready to put on my big girl clothes yet. Let’s save the stole and the ministerial robes for later, when I am ordained “Dude CC.” I came up with that. You can use it. Free.

I would have chosen brown over white, but it wouldn’t have matched anything else anyone was wearing, and I wanted to blend in, not stand out… even though a brown hoodie is my synecdoche for the city.

A synecdoche is a device in poetry where you use the part for the whole, like calling a car “wheels.” In this way, the wedding is syndecdoche for what I believe is my whole life’s work. Even if I’m never ordained, I’ve learned more about what I think of scripture by writing to you than most people do in years of schooling…. because then, you learn a lot about what other people think of scripture and it takes another few years to develop your own spin.

I don’t do it without help, though. I have many volumes of William Barclay’s work on my Kindle, as well as John T. Robinson, A.W. Tozer, Paul Tillich, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Most of the books I’ve bought from smile.amazon.com (so that part of my purchase goes to Doctors Without Borders) have been recommended by guests on The RobCast and On Being with Krista Tippett.

What is interesting about Tozer is that he received his first call to serve a church without attending seminary or being ordained. I suppose the tradeoff was that it was in Nutter Fort, WV. There’s nothing wrong with West Virginia- it’s lovely. But when people ask where my church is, the last thing I want to escape my lips is “Nutter Fort.” Although, with my history of bipolar disorder, maybe it would be fitting. At the very least, hilarious.

It wasn’t until 1950 that he even got a degree. He taught himself everything he missed in high school, college, and grad school. It wasn’t until 1950 that he was given a Doctor of Letters from Wheaton College… and he began his ministry in 1919. We don’t believe a lot of the same things, but his story in and of itself is inspiring.

I also look to my father’s mother, who went to college while raising four kids and was invited to stay on as a biology professor, but didn’t want to move away from Lone Star and needed a job closer to home. She became a lab technician at the local hospital, where she jokingly called herself “the blood and tinkle lady.”

I learned this from talking to my grandfather on his birthday, another marathon conversation in which we covered everything from family stories to how we both reacted to Option B by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant. He said that he thought it was for younger people.

I’ve been thinking about that one line for days now, especially as I approach my 40th birthday and what I want my second act to become.

More kind, certainly. More loving. More open. Less quick to focus on the J in INFJ. Learning to ask for help before I need it rather than waiting until the absolute last second when I’m about to drown to admit that something might be wrong.

I can only think about what I want my life to look like emotionally, because physically, I am stuck. I am considering everything from high-power IT job to busboy. It doesn’t matter. What matters is being able to write every day, being able to further my work in the world that is only mine.

I think I need someone to look over my resume, because I’ve gotten a few bites, but not enough to actually lead to anything. It’s not fair- I’m too talented to be overlooked, and yet, I am. All the time.

Although I think I will go back to cooking, if only for a short while. I realized that I missed it when I looked at all my water bottle mix-in packages and I’d cut them all on the bias. I was also making pasta the other day and used food-grade scissors to chiffonade turkey and basil.

It was the first time I’d cooked anything in almost a year. I tend to run on sandwiches and snacks, because with Filipino, Indian, and Cameroonian roommates, the kitchen is rarely free. One of my roommates commented that she’d never seen me cook anything and wasn’t sure I knew how. I told her that I’d cooked professionally and she said, “well, you keep saying that, but I’ve never actually seen you do it.” I didn’t say anything. I just made aioli from scratch. I miss my Popeye forearms.

I also miss being able to eat whatever the hell I want because the job is such a workout that you need that level of caloric intake. Because first, there’s the dance with the brigade. Second of all, there’s the sauna that all kitchens are.

It’s like doing Zumba crossed with Bikram yoga for ten or eleven hours at a clip.

How did we get from A.W. Tozer to garlic mayonnaise?

It’s ok. I doubt I can turn water into wine at Bryn’s wedding. But if I do, I will go down in history as the second coolest preacher ever.

It feels like it’s been eons in writing days since I’ve posted, but you have to know that it’s hard for me to come up with something to write ABOUT. My life is currently very small, and I like it that way. I don’t get into any trouble. Prianka and Dan are off traveling… well, that’s not exactly true. Prianka is off traveling, and Lindsay is, too (I think… last time I saw a picture of her, she was in Costa Rica). Dan is in Vermont at a Russian language immersion camp, and won’t be back for over a month. I have tentative plans to get together with Ingrid and Leslie #1, but we haven’t firmed up dates yet. However, Lindsay will come back soon and it is possible that she will be in Portland the same week I am (fingers crossed).

Before I finish this entry, though, I thought I’d post a picture of myself that I took with my web cam. The reasons are twofold. The first is to prove that the web cam on my computer is not as shitty as I thought it was. The second is that I haven’t taken a profile picture in a long time, just using old ones because I’m not as wrinkly (I’ll be 40 on Sept. 10th). In short, this is what I actually look like this year. I’m one of those lesbians that looks like a ten-year-old (maybe 15) boy until you get close enough to see that I’m going grey and I have bags under my eyes, and wrinkles that thankfully go up, because I got them from laughing so hard. In this picture, you can also tell that I actually own boobs. That’s a rarity, because the more I dress like a boy, the less I get hassled by them. It’s so odd to be a lesbian in the world these days, because if men think you’re “one of the boys,” they won’t even bother coming up to you. And yet, flirting with boys is one of my specialties, as long as it doesn’t go anywhere. Attention is attention, and their humor is different than women’s. Not better or worse, just different. But if I make the effort to look all girly and cute, it’s way more male attention than I ever bargain for. Thus, the strangeness. Also, when I’m “all nellied out,” men seem to think I’m hitting on them even when I’m just being nice, polite, and Southern… which is not always, but often, all the same thing.

Thus the conundrum of what to wear to Bryn’s wedding. I’ve never been an officiant before, although I have “worn it like I stole it” in one memorable worship service, and even though I am a Dudeist Priest, I doubt Bryn and Corey want me to do their wedding in a bathrobe and jelly sandals (well, I haven’t asked…. maybe they do). Believe me when I say that I’m going to be good at this. I have done just enough worship services to have confidence that this wedding WILL go off with a hitch (see what I did there?). For the rest of my life, no matter how many weddings I do (Dudeist or UCC), I’ll always be able to say that my best friend’s was the first. She says she already knew that… asking me wasn’t a coincidence. I told her I already knew that, because I could read her like a book. And it’s true. I had a feeling that was the case.

I believe in my talent because I was “trained” by the best. It’s not just having watched my dad all those years (although that helps, certainly). It’s having a UCC pastor that was OFTEN willing to hand over the pulpit to me, and not just that. Letting me do the whole service front to back, from bulletin to benediction. Throwing me into the fire was the best education ever, and I think the reason she did it was because she knew I was testing the waters for my own career, trusting in my past (it worked). The only thing I’ve ever wanted to prove to myself is that I am just as talented as my dad (it worked). Though preaching is my passion, there is nothing in the world like writing a call to worship and hearing the congregation read them back to you in unison. It is seriously better than drugs, even caffeine.

The thing I’ve got to work on is refining my style. There’s nothing like manuscripting a sermon and flipping two pages at once and not realizing it…. and yes, I’ve done it. I also fell down the stairs to the pulpit after one of my sermons, and that was even more memorable than anything I’ve ever said…. both to me and the 300 people watching.

I also really love doing children’s sermons. One Sunday I pulled out a map and asked the kids how many different ways there were to get from Portland to DC. They traced their fingers along the highways and said there were so many they couldn’t count them all. I said “that’s how many ways there are to get to God.” The light bulb smiles that followed were priceless.

At Bridgeport, the pastor does not usually give what we used to call “the offering pitch.” It’s a member of the congregation who generally tells a story about how much the church has meant to them. I told the story of Jamie Brabham, an usher at our church in Naples, who, if he thought you didn’t give enough money, would pass the plate down again. As people howled, I said, “no one can do everything, but everyone can do something.” And that’s when I realized I didn’t have one damn dollar on me. #dumbassattack

This reminds me of my favorite Lindsay story. I’d just gotten my driver’s license, and it was my job to shuttle her back and forth to church. One Sunday she was the one who put money in the plate, and then leaned over to me and whispered, “can we go to Subway for lunch?” When I nodded yes, she said, “but you have to pay for lunch because I paid for church.” Dear Jesus did I have trouble keeping it together after that.

That was the year my father was pastor of Christ United Methodist in Sugar Land, where it would be remiss of me not to celebrate Lahonda Sharp’s retirement after 33 years. Lahonda was my choir director, as well as my mother’s. Though she and my mother got along famously, what I really remember about that time in my life is the comedic routines that exist between a choir director and a pastor. My dad and Lahonda routinely cracked people up like Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon. Bonus points if you get that reference, and the bonus is that you’re old.

I hope that by the time I’m ready for my own call, or ready to start my own church plant, that I have someone I can “shake and bake” with, too.

Now that my mom is gone, I have run out of ideas. But that’s ok. I will meet that man or woman someday. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t met them yet. One step at a time.

Starting with a wedding.

When we last left off, I had just come home from a sailing race in which we A) lost 2) I tore up my knee and my shin on something hard and sharp that I cannot name. My leg is still recovering, which means that I am wearing pants out of respect for others. By the time I finish this entry, we’ll be setting up for a picnic on the porch, because it’s supposed to rain. Of course it’s supposed to rain on the night when fireworks are supposed to pop all over the DMV (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia for those who don’t live here). My favorite memory of the Fourth in DC was going up to the top of my friend Molly’s apartment building and watching the fireworks on The Mall up close and the fireworks in Maryland and Virginia in the distance. If it doesn’t happen this year, at least I have the penultimate memory of it in years past.

Back to you, Bob. Let’s go to the phones.

Last Friday I went to see Ben Folds: Declassified at the Kennedy Center, and it was my first time in that venue. As I was walking up the steps, every scene in The West Wing ever filmed there went through my head. The tickets were all one price, so I got the perfect seat- row Y in the Orchestra. The concert was not what I expected. It was even better.

It seems as if Ben Folds is a man on a mission, because this was not a Ben Folds concert, per se. He did play Bastard from Songs for Silverman, about losing his grandfather and having to clean out his house. His grandfather was actually a great guy, he explained, but his name was “Baxter,” so all the grandkids called him “Bastard” behind his back just because it was funny. That was pretty much the beginning and the end of the classic Ben Folds old school era. He played piano for the other two artists with the National Symphony Orchestra behind him, and at the end played the third movement of his own piano concerto, which was FANTASTIC. He opened the piano and played the strings Tori Amos-style. I can’t wait until the rest is published.

To me, the mission was simple. Try and get younger people to buy symphony tickets, because in this day and age, they don’t. This is inexplicable to me, because exposure to classical music as a child led me to a lifelong love of it. The two years I spent playing classical music in orchestra were some of the best of my life, and the scariest. They were the only two years in which I had what are called “juries,” which determine your place in the orchestra. I never got first desk, but that is because the actual first desk, Norman, was out of this world good and it would have taken an Act of God to beat him. The first year, it was just Norman and me. The second year, I was moved down to third out of fourth chair, because second chair, Danny, was also Act of God unbeatable. It’s not that I was bad. It was that no matter how much I practiced, I was never going to be a natural virtuoso, one that could play anything put in front of me on the first try, talent beating out hard work, and definitely not beating out that kind of talent PLUS hard work.

It didn’t matter, though. I was just glad to be in orchestra at all…. although my favorite memory of orchestra is the conductor stopping the whole shebang and yelling, “Leslie Lanagan! Get rid of that JAZZ SOUND!”

However, jazz and hip hop backed up by full orchestra went nicely together in Friday’s concert. This was my favorite piece, Wake Up, by Danay Suárez. If you don’t know that name, you should. She did three pieces, and all of them were amazing and get stuck in my head when I’m trying to sleep. It’s ironic that when my head hits the pillow, all I hear is “WAKE UP!” The song itself is about trying to stay woke in an oppressive system, which I know because the translation is in the program… I couldn’t pick up that much Spanish as fast as it was going by…..

A few days later, my certificate of ordination and my letter of good standing in the Church of the Latter Day Dude came in the mail. Now, I realize that to a lot of people, this is sacrilegious and offensive that I would do an end run around graduate school. However, I didn’t want to make Bryn and Corey wait to get married until I finished my last year and a half of my Bachelor’s and my three years of grad school. It was important to Bryn that I do the wedding, so it was a no-brainer to get ordained over the Internet, even though both of those bits of schooling are in the works. One of these days, I’ll be a UCC pastor. For now, you can call me Her Dudeliness, or Right on, Rev if you’re into the whole brevity thing. My father used to call himself “The More or Less Reverend David Lanagan,” which I think is also perfect for me, but I don’t steal. I’m just the “minister” that really ties the wedding together. I am under no illusion that I am really ordained for anything, even though my letter of good standing says I am. If you want to be baptized into The Church of the Latter Day Dude, I’ll give you my phone number…. or if you want to be married by a Dudeist Priest, same.

But I still follow the words of Jesus of Nazareth, and I always will. To me, this is just the stopgap measure on my way to the real thing, like the Hydrox you buy when you can’t afford Oreos.

There is life and truth in the red letters, and I never forget that fact.

Amen.
#prayingonthespaces

You know how sometimes people invite you to do things, but accidentally leave out critical bits of information? This was one of those days. When Lindsay asked me if I wanted to go sailing today, neither one of us knew that we were actually going to be racing the boat. And by “we,” there were plenty of crew members who knew what they were doing, and our job was to sit where they told us… because as it turns out, just being weight in the right place at the right time (staying out of other people’s way) is almost as important as pulling lines and raising sails.

When we first got on the boat, I did what I always do in new situations. I fell down. Monocular vision, fields of vision different depending on dominant eye, didn’t see something because it wasn’t there a second ago, yadda yadda yadda. I banged up my knee and my shin right good. Luckily, I was so hopped up on adrenaline from finding out that we were racing that it didn’t hurt too much. Everyone kept asking me if I was okay, because my leg looks like I got in a fight with a dog and lost…. badly.

All of this is not to evoke pity, just to explain why even being dead weight was a steep learning curve. Tacking and jibing became more and more difficult as the excitement wore off, because that meant our group had to move from one side of the boat to the other, with our heads low enough not to get smacked by the boom. It was kind of like being a soccer goalie, because there were long periods of doing nothing followed by twenty seconds of hauling ass… I had no idea what place we were in, because there were boats all over. You could tell which boats were just on the Chesapeake having fun because they weren’t sailboats…. and yet, there was no real order to the sailboats, either.

I am very competitive when it comes to team sports, because I don’t want to be the weakest link. So I took a video and pictures on my phone during our “down time,” and during chaos, I just gritted my teeth and tried to move as quickly as my body would let me… because thinking that we were losing because I was in pain was unacceptable. Lindsay asked what place we were in, and everybody kind of agreed they didn’t want to know…. but it wasn’t because I hurt myself and was moving slow or that we weren’t a good team. We just weren’t awesome. There were three-man professional teams out there today, and I know that because “I raced with them.”

At one point, in utter disbelief, I turned to the man I’d just met, “Fletch,” and said, holy shit… I’m in the middle of a sailing race. This is not where I expected my day to end up. When Lindsay and I got there, they were loading up the boat with alcohol and ice. I joked with everyone that we were going drinking and sailing was just background noise. They laughed and agreed with me…. when in reality, the alcohol and ice was for after the race was over. So what I thought would be this leisurely sail around the Bay was more like having your hair catch fire several times an hour.

It was exhilarating, every moment of it.

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