Our great truck adventure (note the look of fear on Eric's face)!
My son has been obsessing over a futon my friend Lori offered to us. In his mind, with the addition of this college-like decor, his room would be “boss”. He told me that means it would be cool. The problem is that I have a Honda, not even a SUV, just a sedan. I love my car but it barely fits two growing boys, a dog and me, much less anything else. So after a few scheduling snafus, a date was set to pick up the futon. Lori has three college aged boys who broke in the futon for us, but fortunately did not destroy it and their mom’s housecleaning was Adam’s gain. So Saturday morning I drove with the boys to Home Depot and rented a large van for the futon frivolity and headed out to the parking lot to start our drive to Marietta. I opened the door to climb in and saw only two seats…two seat belts…three of us.
As some of you know, 
I had the surprise of my life this year when I received a phone call from a PR company in New York telling me I had won the grand prize in the Sister Schubert’s Memorable Moments contest (http://www.sisterschuberts.com/). To be honest, I remember entering the essay in November, but promptly forgot with the holidays approaching and the end of school whirlwind in December. Needless to say, once I realized the message wasn’t a joke or about a time share, I got really excited! Flash forward to March and the process of winning this gift continues. Not only was it a gentle nudge, I believe, from God encouraging me in my writing dreams, but I get a trip for four to the Mexican Riviera at an all inclusive that I am so looking forward to sharing with my mom and sister in laws. We never get to spend time together without a little (or big) boy interrupting our conversations with crying, tattling, needing a ride somewhere or help finding something in the refrigerator. We love our boys, but even five minutes of uninterrupted silence is a gift, so five days of this will be heaven!
Caroline, my intern, is whip smart , level headed and absolutely beautiful. Although she is 23 and I am….more than 23, I always enjoy her insights into life from a less world weary perspective. We were chatting at lunch the other day and she had asked me if I had ever heard of something called Missed Connections. “You mean like when your flight gets in late?” I asked. She laughed and told me no, it was a new dating website. She explained that some of her friends had been talking about it and although it sounded dubious to her, she thought I might want to check it out online later that night. You know, for blog “research”. It is an interesting, albeit a little creeptastic, concept that sounds more like a Lifetime Movie waiting to be filmed than a healthy way to meet people. The website description was as follows:
Every 14 seconds a child becomes an orphan due to AIDS in Africa. Every 14 seconds. I cannot begin to imagine the sadness and hopelessness that haunts those left behind, the spectre of death just part of everyday life. My friend Leigh Ann told me about her family’s involvement with Heart for Africa (www.heartforafrica.org ) years ago when our boys were in school together. Leigh Ann is a tiny little thing with a big heart and a ton of energy. She is the kind of person who, when you talk to her, you always leave smiling. It is her gift. So when she shared her story with me, I couldn’t help but be drawn in.
I was dozing watching the Oscars Sunday night, flipping channels when the technical awards were given and when the freaky Gap dance extravagnaza wasted ten minutes of an already long show. I love the gorgeous gowns, the gossipy interviews on the carpet and of course, Clooney (even the cranky version he brought to the Oscars this time). The awards I really wanted to see most were not going to be shown until the last fifteen minutes and the ice tea I had been drinking all day had left me with a restless buzz in my quest to stay up past eleven pm. I changed the channel back to the awards show just in time to catch the John Hughes’ tribute. I grew up in the 80s and feel like the characters from the Breakfast Club were my peers during the tumultuous high school years. I settled in for my walk down memory lane, the echoes of Simple Mind’s “Don’t You Forget About Me” running through my head.
A Code Red was called this morning at work. In light of the recent school shooting in Colorado, this was nothing to fool around with and the school proceeded to lockdown mode. I was pretty confident it was only a drill (it was), but the school shootings recounted in the paper over the past few years made me second guess myself. As I sat in the dark with another teacher for a very long five minutes, the silence was broken by someone jiggling our locked door loudly. We immediately tensed and waited, and the best plan I could come up with was to grab my son’s saxophone case he had left and beat the crap out of whoever barged through the door brandishing a weapon. My friend Lori had a small, dented metal trashcan at the ready as well, but thankfully we didn’t have to use them to humiliate defend ourselves. The “perp” turned out to just be a thorough administrator checking on our safety protocol.
My intern mentioned she heard about new research into a “kindness gene” recently. We began a discussion about the impact of the discovery and it’s relationship to Williams syndrome. Is kindness nurture vs. nature? Free will versus hard wire? Valuable gift or annoying oddity? I have been described as “too kind for my own good” by many people (including my mom and co-workers). I really don’t mind this backhanded compliment because I wouldn’t want to be defined by the alternative. What I mean by this is that I would rather have someone take advantage of a kindness 1 out of 100 times I offer it versus not offering kindness to anyone because they might not be on the up and up. My dad apparently has this genetic quirk too, but it is a gift I have always admired in him and I am glad he passed it on to me.
I looked at the pictures on my wall, part of the collage of photographs topped with giant wooden letters that spell out BOYS, and my eyes lighted on one of my favorites. It is from the day my youngest was born, eleven years ago on a snowy Friday. The flash hadn’t gone off, but there was just enough ambient light from the window behind me to envelope us in a soft, halo like light. Me in the middle, looking content and exhausted, with a chubby, sleeping newborn cradled into my left arm and a squirmy, smiling big brother being restrained with my right arm. As I looked across the wall, the pattern of 3 continued of me and my boys as they grew. It is pretty apparent when you look around the photographs around my home that I am a single mom. It only bothers me when I see other people’s pictures, including the dad, and I feel a little envious of the visual and emotional balance of a two parent family.
There were only four friends initially, but Adam’s phone kept buzzing with new texts. I have noticed that teenagers rarely speak to one another on their phones, preferring to text important communication like: omg, k, cool. This even happens when they are in the same room or car together. It is bizarre, just a bunch of clicking and then big laughter of everyone being in on the joke except me, but maybe it’s just sour grapes on my part. They are an odd combination of kids morphing into grown ups. Almost, but not quite.
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