Do over

I was not happy with that Memory Lane post. I was tired and distracted when I wrote it, and it did not say what I wanted it to say.

I wanted to talk about what a lovely person my friend’s mom was. How much I admired her, and how said I am that she’s gone. Due to my somewhat unusual background, very religious people often make me uncomfortable. That was never the case with my friend’s mom, even though she was a devout Catholic whose faith permeated all facets of her life. She was someone who tried very hard to live life as a true Christian – helping the less fortunate, treating others with kindness and never judging – and when she said “God bless you” you knew she was handing you the highest compliment she had to offer. She was an eternal optimist and lived a life that seemed to be filled with joy. Over the years I saw her get flustered or stressed out from time to time, but never angry. And while she lived a very traditional life while I knew her, she also had lived a very daring life before she settled down, married a widower with six kids and had a child of her own. In a time when women weren’t given a ton of options, she traveled the world as a stewardess, living in Tokyo and the Philippines and going all over Asia. She could fit twice as many clothes in a suitcase as a normal person, rolling everything up carefully so there’d be more room and nothing would get wrinkled. Eventually she came back to the States, got her Master’s and then went to live in San Francisco. When I was struggling to learn to drive a stick shift, she told me a hysterical story about learning to drive on the hills of San Francisco and rolling backwards halfway down some huge street. And that’s just the way she was. Supportive, encouraging, and always ready to laugh. I’m sad that’s she gone, and I’m devastated for my friend.

I also wanted to talk about how seeing all those people from my past, and going to so many places from my… youth, I guess it would be, considering the span of years from Kindergarten to the end of high school, reminded me that even in today’s fast paced modern world, where it seems sometimes like I do all my communicating through technology – phone, email, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, texting and so on – I’m still connected to other people. That I can go to a place and have someone say “Hey Mom, remember Hillary Maidenname?” and that mom will cry out in joy and give me a huge hug. That there are people who remember my birthday party at Shakey’s when I was six, that we played hide and seek in the boxwoods when we were in second grade, that my friend and I convinced her older sister to take us to see Beverly Hills Cop even though it was rated R and a whole lot more. It felt good to see them all, and hear about their lives, and to say to them, yes, I have a good life. I’m happy. It is so easy to get caught up in the day to day business of living life, and then you look up and realize a whole year has flashed by. And so I walked away from funeral quite determined to spend more time with the people who matter in my life.