Friday, September 19, 2014

5.5 hours

In 6 hours I will be 44 years old.

I want to see this as just another day, and yet so much has changed.

In 44 years I have:

Driven across country 6 times.
Visited 12 countries.
Gotten married and divorced. (in the same year)
Had 5 dogs.
Had 6 cats.
Had 2 turtles.
Been to Red Sox games in 16 parks.
Have gone to 34 professional baseball fields.
Lived in 6 states.
Base jumped.
Been a teacher.
Been a student.
Loved.
Lost.
Been a white water raft guide.
Made and lost friends.
Learned what it means to be connected.
Matured (sorta)
Attended hockey games in 2 countries and 7 states.
Experienced love.
Experienced loss.
Peaked mountains in 4 countries.
Competed as a triathlete.
Gone to college.
Gone to a Michigan game.
Felt lost.
Found meaning and purpose.
Felt dismissed, abused, excused and forgotten.
Felt appreciated and loved.
Gotten to know myself.

I have lived. Have you?

Monday, September 15, 2014

A shout out to the 01562


            It is not that my childhood did not have good moments, great ones even. It is honestly that I cannot pinpoint an experience that impacted me enough to merit a narrative. Then suddenly last Thursday, it occurred to me that it was not a moment that changed me. It was a place.
The town I grew up in, with a population just shy of 10,000 was straight out of a Norman Rockwell drawing. We had a pond called Muzzy Meadow that we would ice skate on, half of us trying to be Dorothy Hamill while the other half shoveled out a hockey rink and picked teams in hopes of emulating Bobby Orr. A rope swing attached to a large old oak tree on Cranberry Lake kept us entertained for hours in the summer when we were not swimming at the town lake or Howe Park. Friday night football games at O’Gara Park were always full of teenagers connecting, flirting and cheering. Our classroom sizes were small, and we were divided in alphabetical order, ensuring that we made lasting friendships with the people closest to us in name. Downtown had a candy store, pizza places, a library and a town hall which always offered activities for the residents. There were also the famous haunted mansions, which we all played in and around to try to see the ghosts that had been written about in the book “Deliver Us From Evil: Spencer’s Hidden Secret”, we were all convinced that we encountered them, although I am not sure that is entirely true.
            My home, unlike most in Spencer, was an apartment.  The second story of a house at 75 Maple St., the rent was $40 dollars a week and we could barely manage that. Spencer was never really part of the plan after all, like most things that had happened over the years preceding our move. Upon divorcing my father when I was 6, my mother relocated us to this tiny town we had never heard of to be closer to her boyfriend, Rodman.  Rodman was nice enough, in a “chill out, why don’t we just play Frisbee and then sing songs while I play guitar” kind of way. He was nothing like my father, and this town was nothing that I was accustomed to.
            I always viewed myself as an outsider. It was hard not to in a town so small, with a community so tightly intertwined. The friends I made seemed mostly to come from the schoolyard across the street from my house, the kids from the streets surrounding mine. Giggy, Sharon and I played HORSE or we would all play kickball or baseball on the pavement that was our play space all through childhood. If we were not in the mood for sports involving balls, we would ride our bikes, reenacting the latest episode of “The Dukes of Hazzard”. No one was required to go home before the streetlights came on, and none of us wanted to.
            Over the years the playmates and the games changed but some things remained steady throughout. The friendships we made, the stories we shared, the situations experienced and the people we admired.
One of those people, for the entire town, was Brian Sweeney. Brian was a football player, an artist, but most importantly an all around nice guy who always had a smile on his face and a kind word for the people he encountered. After graduating from Boston University, Brian went on to become a pilot in the Navy fighting in the Gulf War and eventually became an instructor at the Navy Fighter Weapons School, all the while continuing to create friends and impact the people around him with his kind heart and ability to face life with passion.
On September 11th, 2001, Brian lost his life while sitting in a plane that was hijacked by terrorists. The loss impacted more than his wife, his siblings, his hometown friends, his military brethren, and his parents. It impacted the entire country as we all listened in horror to the phone call he made and the recording he left on his wife Julie’s answering machine. A testimony to the man he was, even in his last moments his thoughts were with the people he loved and his wishes for their happiness.
            Last week, on the 13th anniversary of the hijacking of the planes, I witnessed something that made me realize what my childhood and that town actually stood for. On September 10th, Brian’s sister Anne changed her profile picture on Facebook. Suddenly instead of her dog, it was Brian in the cockpit of a fighter jet. Throughout the next 36 hours, one by one, hundreds of people followed suit. Although the pictures people chose varied, one thing was perfectly clear, we remembered. Silently, a group of people spanning the globe, but originally from Spencer, stood unified behind and with the family and close friends of our fallen hero.

            I cannot claim that the day a classmate did not pick me for Red Rover, making the varsity basketball squad as a freshman, being the only girl on my baseball team, going to parties or the thousands of other things that I experienced in Spencer and throughout my childhood did not impact me at all. All of my childhood is relevant, not primarily as individual strands of memories but rather as a woven finished product that made my town, and my childhood, complete.