Many years ago, I had several images impact my heart. Have you ever just been standing still and felt time wind to a stop as if it were intentionally trying to get your attention? I have. I remember coming home one night from work on I-30 and watching a car spin out of control in front of me. As it bounced off the concrete median, I could not help but notice how slow it seemed to spin. My heart sure was not beating slowly. My reactions to jerk my own steering wheel in a safe direction sure was not slow. Although this very short occurrence in the past moments of my life seem to resemble one of these images burned into my brain that I have been trapped by tonight, it is not. I have, however: been able to travel back to several "dits" on my life's timeline to similar ones. The birth of my first daughter. My eyes cry even as I sit and briefly remember how precious that was. Even further back I can see out my window at 9 years of age as if there has been no time passed waiting on my first pet I lost to return home. I had a friend at 12 years of age that came to my house one night, very late, only to tell me that her step brother had just raped her and her father hit her until she promised not to tell anyone. She told me. The horror of that moment was so innocent but burned into my heart with such helpless devotion to my friend. Years later I saw her at a neighborhood pool. The exchange of words spoken through childhood eyes was still saturated in a deep secret shamefully kept and she looked like the wreckage my heart felt for her years before. When I was 6, my new daddy, had hidden some Easter eggs in the yard. His delight was to see me frantically searching for the ever mischievous bunny that was just around the corner but I was not fast enough to catch him. I learned to be faster. My dad was watching me, but somehow, even through such young eyes, I have a vision of his very animated face cheering me on to catch that bunny! That very same yard is also where I found my first treasure, a silver dollar. I often wonder if he did not plant it in my favorite digging hole just so I could find the treasure that I KNEW was out there somewhere. I loved feeling the cold dirt and even mud on my hands! I sure love him for those times. When I was young, I felt safe because he was my dad. I cannot explain why, I just did. He taught me to run into what I was afraid of. A friend is often defined by the trouble they help you avoid, but I love the partnership of defying that which strikes fear into the depths of our souls. Many dark passageways. I grew up going to the lake at my grandparents lake house in central Texas. The sun was hot and the water was ICE COLD! The ledge was a good 15 feet off the water and underneath was the unknown. The first time I determined in my gut and jumped into that scary shark infested LAKE, I must have been in the air for at least 5 minutes! Hitting the icy water sure made me wish I had been. It was one of many times that I would have a love affair with water or maybe just the exhilaration I felt while immersed in it. Still, this is just one of those memories that are time coded at half speed but not at a dead halt. I used to volunteer at an "old folks home". I know it is not politically correct to say that now days but it has such sweet connotation to me. It has been lost to our children now to see things as they are and be able to share it appropriately from our their perspectives in a search to find a way to make all people happy. All people are not happy. All people are not equal in so many things. It is why we need each other. I miss those days terribly. Well, one day , while running into the rooms of old folks that could not leave their rooms nor did they have family to visit, I came across a man who was standing by his chair near a window. He was very tall and thin with the blackest hair I had ever seen on a face with so many wrinkles. He smiled so big when I walked in. Leaving his room at that point was not an option. We miss such sweet insight to the past and future when we run past careless pieces of our life that have no real rhyme or reason. At least , it seems that way at the time. That afternoon is a blur. It really was. Somewhere during that day I did leave but not until I heard that he was an Italian Officer in WWII, saw some pretty buttons that he caressed like an old friend, told me about men he had lost through a trembling voice, and a wife he missed dearly. At 14, I could not process those words of images, but now , much later, I often think of his smile. So few people smile like that anymore at anyone they do not know. I have always felt connected to something that I cannot explain but it always has a real face. His was one of them. That same year, I spent time with my Great Grandma by marriage only but she never, not one time, made me feel less important than any of the other great grand children. Man, did she have stories. Between General Hospital and As The World Turns, I heard of coming to Texas in a covered wagon. One time she took her shotgun to her sons after they broke a tree, I think. She looked at me and told me that she hit the ground on purpose cause she wasn't aimin' at any one of them boys anyways. I was in awe of her. One of her 10 or 11 kids lived with her til she passed. Aunt Neil never married that I know of but she sure knew something about mothering a young girl. Taught me the proper way to snap peas and how amazing fried squash from your own garden tastes with a big glass of sweet tea. Too few years left at that point but I did not know such things. I laid on her bed with the cotton bedspread. You know the kind that feels so soft and has loops all over it in designs. Huge windows and sweet summer breezes in Nanny's house one summer out of 45 or so now. I don't have to close my eyes to live that moment again. There was a day that stood out from some just like it for some reason. I felt fear. I had felt fear before and walked in the darkness to conquer it before, but this was different. I had fallen in love and now had been thrown aside as if my love was not good enough. My sweet precious children were crying and the sirens were going off. A tornado had just touched down not 1 mile from my house. I had no car because he left it with the friend who took him to the airport to meet her for the first time. He never returned. Two in diapers, and four looking at me in fright and I was scared for the first time in forever. I remember choking back the tears and calming my kids down with many prayers. Standing at the kitchen door, I was my laundry. I had no dryer and my laundry was getting wet and rained on and tossed about. I do not know what the wind speed was measured at, but there were only a few items of clothing left on the line by morning. It rained for a few days and I just watched my laundry get wet then dry, wet then dry. I did not even attempt to bring it in. It seemed so unreal that my laundry was still a complete family of clothes and we were not. Trees went down that first day and then again on the third day. The house next to ours had a tree that had been severed in two. A coat hanger was hangin on a knot of this broken tree. Just sitting there through the entire storm. It stayed on that tree knot through the wind and rain. I had no where to go so I watched my laundry not dry and the hanger not fall. The first day of sun, I discovered that my laundry was in the trees and I had boys underwear in places that I could not even go up to take down. This moment is frozen in time. This moment was when I was afraid and time stopped and said, "Look!". People are precious, no matter where they are or who they are or what pain they feel. The eyes of others have seen things that don't change with time.
Take some time to borrow someone else's eyes~Mel
