At Abbott Loop Elementary in Anchorage, my brother was two grades ahead of me. He and his friend Jeff were the first class of students to go all the way through (1st through 6th grade) the recently formed and somewhat controversial “optional program”. Our classrooms were in a lollipop shaped off-shoot, separated from the main body of the school, and joined/separated by the library at the base and a breezeway on either end. “The Pod”, as it was called, was six classrooms that were really three classrooms. They could be joined or separated by moving walls and in practice, we were coupled into three classes with two teachers for each: 1st & 2nd grades, 3rd & 4th and 5th & 6th.

Our classrooms didn’t have doors, the students had cubby holes where our pencils and papers lived in “tote trays” with our names taped to the fronts. There were couches, tables and chairs in the rooms - but no desks. We weren’t given grades, instead we were passed or failed - we got smiley face stamps on our papers when we’d done well, or red marks when we didn’t. We called our teachers by their first names.

In third grade, one of my teachers was Kathy McCord. She wore silk blouses and pressed slacks, fashionable kitten heels with peep toes, and always had on a necklace with a leaf pendant that very much looked like and probably was, an actual leaf that had been dipped in gold. I think I asked her about it once and she said she got in Hawaii, but I could be making that up. She had beautiful jet black hair with specks of gray, it came to the middle of her neck in perfectly formed just-came-from-the-salon 70’s curls. She had dark skin and perfect bright white teeth we got to see a lot, because Kathy was always smiling.

Third grade was a hard one for me, mom was sick and I was a mess of a child. I talked with my hands flailing, told inappropriate jokes during Show and Tell, and was really generally an obnoxious little troll starved for attention. Kathy was patient and kind and tolerated my misguided energy like a saint. I wouldn’t have the same luck in fourth grade…but I digress.

One afternoon after Kathy had handed our tests or homework back to us, I found marks on mine indicating wrong answers. I walked to her and prepared for debate, standing next to her as she sat, holding my paper. I attempted to justify my answers and convince her that my logic would wondrously make a wrong answer into a right one.

She’s sitting in her chair listening patiently and trying to explain what I didn’t want to hear, and I’m standing on her left side. I was about as tall standing up as she was sitting down…and I loved that about her. She wanted to be on the same level we were.

I was getting more and more animated and flailing my hands about as if they could communicate better than my mouth when *THUNK*. The pencil I’d been holding in my right hand was now firmly planted in her left eye.

She let out a yelp, pulled the pencil out and headed for the hospital. Janet someone-or-another who lived in my neighborhood and was in the class above mine said something horrible to me about it. I don’t remember what it was exactly, only that she missed the fact that it was an accident and made me hate her.

Kathy was fine - the pencil hit the white part of her eye and didn’t cause any long term damage. She always had a spot there, though, where I got her.

A few years later when mom became more ill, Kathy took me to dinner and shopping. She took me to Harry’s and we sat at a quiet table where I ate a burger and she talked to me like a grown up. I bought a dress, a hat and hose that afternoon. My first pair of hose.

There were a few other outings with Kathy, but I started growing up - finding independence/rebellion, and she had her own life - a divorce and two grown boys that had issues of their own.

Many years later on a visit back home I tried to catch her at the school to say hello, but she’d transferred to another program across town. A few years past that, I got a letter in the mail from one of my childhood girlfriends mother.

“I thought you’d want to know” the note said. I unfolded the slip of paper enclosed, ashy colored and clearly cut from the local newspaper. It was Kathy’s obituary.

I regret never having told her how her energy made a mark on me, how the interest she showed just may have been the little bit I needed to keep me on the crooked and narrow. How the chunk of love she gave made a difference and ensured my survival.

I still think about her regularly - she’s always in a maroon blouse with a scooped neckline and black trousers. She’s slipping a finger in the shoulder of her shirt to adjust her strap (she did this regularly but it wasn’t until years later that I understood it). She’s wearing that wonderful necklace, smiling, and glowing like an angel.

Me? I’m still the kid who stabbed her teacher in the eye with a pencil.

As I drove back from Callaway Gardens Sunday afternoon, I found myself on the outskirts of Atlanta, beginning to merge into the predictable cluster-o-traffic bafoons…and sobbing.

The radio was tuned to the local NPR station where Valarie Jackson was interviewing Davy Isay, creator of the Story Corps Project about his new book “Listening Is an Act of Love”.

Several times I’ve been caught in my morning commute, affording me the stillness needed to enjoy a piece from this project. I always find my lids growing fat with tears. Now, I had a concentrated dose, with Isay’s personal accounts of the experiences he’s had and the people he’s encountered during the project.

One young man, he recounted, came to Story Corps to talk about his father. The young man was a steel worker who told with pride and enthusiasm of the first time his father brought him to the factory and how he eventually followed in his footsteps. He told of his fathers long life and the eventual heath changes that brought him to be in a hospital full time, unaware of his surroundings; his organs making their way along the slow, deliberate path to the end of life.

The nurses and doctors would study the old man, perplexed, while his father made unconscious movements with his hands until one day his son happened to come into the room as they were watching. Someone spoke to the son and said “we’ve been watching your father, and he’s been doing this thing with his hands…we can’t figure it out.”

The son said he knew as soon as he saw it - his father was making steel. He was making steel until the day he died.

My chin quivered and plump drops fell out of my head.

There was another story - read by the woman Chaplin who experienced it - about employees in the basement of a hospital that pack the equipment needed for surgeries. They’re in a gray, sterile room with no windows and day in and day out, they get a packing list. It has the name of the patient, the planned surgery, and the packing list of what’s needed for the operation. These people prayed. They prayed as they packed each and every set of instruments. One woman had been there for forty years…praying.

I bawled. I made the face I make when I don’t think I should be crying. I snapped a picture for my 365 that I’ll never upload. I cried more.

I’d spent the hours prior wandering about a tropical butterfly house, snapping pictures of colorful spastic insects, selfishly enjoying a few hundred acres of snow covered trees and grounds that were barely populated due to the inclement weather.

I had reveled in my solitude and given thanks for the quiet space. It was time I’d desperately needed for reflection, though now, I felt selfish about it.

I sniffled and wept a little more.

Before going home, I stopped in the place I used to take myself on self date night for my standard menu at my standard spot, belly up to the bar. I opened my book and sipped water to wash down the ideas being presented to me – the idea that you can do whatever you want to do, if you make up your mind to do it.

I started making excuses: Job. Debt. Not knowing where to begin.

I caught myself. Anyone and everyone can create change. My favorite poet came to mind and her words typed themselves across a screen in my mind – “It’s really that simple, but it’s never that easy. How can we understand change when our socks have always been in the same drawer?”

I need to think bigger. I need to do more. I need to find a way to make an impact.

I bawled inside and beat myself up a little.

I thought of the conversation Kelly and I had last week (or the week before?) about stepping forward and being cheerleaders for the people we love, for helping them identify their dreams and pushing them forward while they chase them into a headwind.

I don’t know what it means yet, this pile of thoughts and ideas. The passion to DO tangles me up.

When I finally arrived back at The Big House, The Mc was on the couch in the media room looking giddy as a kid with his Halloween bounty as he looked from the big screen and the pigskin to me with the plate of 5 layer dip I’d made, a pile of chips on his lap and a toothy grin.

Retiring to the bedroom I popped in one of the DVD’s that had arrived: Evening.

I bawled more. Not because the movie was two stars at best, but because I fear being on my deathbed with a pile of regrets climbing all over me like maggots, eating away whats left of my soul.

I crashed the one man football party and sobbed on the couch to The Mc, stammering something about dying without living, about missing my father, about hating breaking up with/loosing friends, about the simultaneous peace and frustration I have being a restless soul, and about the basic but key, driving changes in my world that I’m on the cusp of making.

He complimented me on my ability to make snot and told me my father would be proud after I’d made my way through a quarter of a roll of TP and created a small mountain of tissue and DNA on the floor.

Swirling around me there are lessons and signs and flashing neon arrows telling me the way I need to go and the things I need to be doing, but it seems like every time I take a step, the signs move.

I’m a little lost and a lot impatient, but I’m thankful for the messages, the signs, the love and the opportunity to receive them all.

I feel better for having cried, if for no other reason than because it means I’m alive…even if I still don’t know where to begin.

I came in to the office this morning to find Elmo had passed in some sort of freak accident over the weekend, where one of his decorative bowl rocks fell and pinned him while he was foraging for food. My gut reaction says contact Properties and have Housekeeping personnel questioned as part of the investigation into his involuntary fishslaughter; but he wouldn’t want that, so I won’t.

Instead, The Mc and I will have a wee wake tonight for my wee friend. We’ve been through a lot together, and I’m going to miss seeing him every day.

Another morning has arrived and my mind remains too exhausted and spiritually hung over to think/write except to offer this: there may be nothing in the world that cleanses my soul the way my bare feet on the earth, great deep gasps of fresh ocean air, and skinny dipping in a crystal clear lake do.

There may be nothing as rewarding as knowing the peace of sleeping under a sky that provides stars you can actually see, in air that caresses and heals your city lungs, or with an alarm clock of birds singing/clucking/crowing to the morning.

There may be nothing as liberating as a shower without walls and a spigot attached to a tree in the middle of the forest to help remind you that you are perfect in your imperfections, and that modesty and a war against age can easily become suffocating.

There may be nothing as rich and pure and beautiful as deep spontaneous belly laughter with friends that causes others to seek you and find the source of the ruckus…even if it was prompted by one of you falling and scraping a knee (only to be attacked by a tipsy friend with a first aid kit).

There may be no greater reminder of our habit to over-complicate things and the need to return to simplicity than drinking out of an old glass jar and watching a turtle as big as my reading chair eat a crab for lunch.

There may be nothing as comforting as finding “home” in friends, in laughter and stories and great adventures, or in s’mores by a campfire that result in your being donned “Minnesota Angels” by strangers (oh, yaaaa).

I’d never smelled the city in the way that I did when we hit her outskirts, she was dirty and thick and full of noise. I’d long since stopped being aware of soap, and it never smelled as perfumed as when I slathered myself with it in attempts to eliminate a funk I was almost unaware of (at least, until we got in the car and it swirled around us).

It’s hard not to want run screaming back into the embrace of that magical place in the forest, and to just fall off the grid for a while, but I can’t. Instead, I’ll let it live on as an escape from reality in bit by itsty bitsy bit over the days and weeks to come. Stories created and lessons learned over 3 short days with 3 wonderful women in the Golden Isles of Georgia nearing the end of the summer of 2007, that I only wish you all could have been there to share - because it was really, that delicious.

Unless of course it’s pictures from our youth.

An old friend from back home was good enough to send me these, and sweet infant Jesus with a baby Einstein set and a thumb sucking issue, I didn’t even recognize myself.

I wish my hindsight had poorer vision.

I barely remember this kid, there’s a void in my memory banks where she should be. It’s no surprise the visions are foggy, it’s been twenty years since I’ve seen her. I have a vague recollection of a lot of Simon and Garfunkel, of the dog-tag necklace with “charms” on it attached via safety pins. Of learning that if I wear black pants and black shoes, I also had to wear black socks. Of hiding my body. Of kids still attached to their mothers apron strings in shopping malls asking “is that a boy or a girl?”. Of skateboarding and drinking underage and being caught and having my stomach pumped at Providence Hospital to “teach me a lesson”. Of nights spent wearing ourselves out dancing in clubs underage and the sun that didn’t set enough in the summer to warrant going to bed. Of afternoons at Denny’s “studying” over bottomless cups of coffee and steak fries with ranch. Of practicing sign language (our foreign language, no Spanish for us) with my friends/classmates on the city bus going to and coming from nowhere in particular. Of dying our hair in the ladies room at the mall and developing the bonds that don’t break.

I love(d) my friends and our great adventures together, but I wouldn’t go back for the world.

If there were an upside to working a 13 hour day, it would be the crystal clear view of my city and her in-town landmarks leaving the office. Nostalgia hopped in the passenger seat and made me stop the car to snap a picture of an old friend with my tires straddling a speed bump just outside of the parking deck. Not very ladylike.

There was a near endless string of nights I’d wait until the dark crept over the rooftops to strap on my running shoes and headphones in preparation for setting out on her streets. Nearly invisible as I thudded on the buckled sidewalks and ducked under overgrown tree limbs, I’d revel in the living that swooshed past/around/next to/nearly on top of me. Young couples in the early stages of what could be love, groups of men finding their identities and alcohol ingestion boundaries, the neighborhood character spottings and my personal game of BINGO that went with them. Noting the new graffiti or shops opening/closing or a broken fire hydrant or damage from a recent rain. The memorization of the lights and the ideal spot to cross the street to avoid being stuck at a red - all these things made her uniquely mine. No one else saw her exactly the same way I did.

I miss living in her belly.

Footnote/linkage love re BINGO: B and I, never wrote about NG or O

Happy birthday to The Mc…my brilliant, handsome and goofy sweetheart.