Jolene, Jolene

The last time my mom and I went out to eat while I was home, the restaurant's hostess turned out to be a woman who had graduated a year or so ahead of me in high school.  She recognized my face right away, and I thought "It has to be her!" as soon as I saw my her name badge--she's the only Jolene I've ever known--and we caught up as we headed toward a booth.  After I'd paid the bill awhile later, I waited until Jolene had a free moment and told her something I'd been wanting to tell her since the ninth grade.  

For weeks of what was my freshman year, I and however-many other students rehearsed after classes and on weekends for the school musical tryouts, learning song lyrics and dance steps for Bye Bye Birdie.  I'd been singing in chorus for the past few years, but picking up choreography was new to me.  After hours and hours spent practicing in the school gym and cafeteria surrounded by so many other students, though, I felt as ready as I could be when Audition Day rolled around.  Up on stage, the school musical directors grouped the first group of students into maybe four rows before taking their seats in the auditorium.  I was in the back row as we began, and it all felt just like it had in rehearsals:  People dancing to either side of me and in front of me.  After the students in the front row were judged, they would be dismissed, and the next row's dancers would move up for their official audition.  My row was finally front-and-center, and as soon as the music began and I found myself looking at the judges and the high school auditorium seats for the first time, as opposed to the dancing students I was used to, I realized I didn't know the choreography at all:  I had just had been keeping up with everyone around me before.  I stood frozen as students on either side of me continued to dance, and my choir director called out, "Val!  Just find your place and keep going!  It's okay!" I  nodded and apologized and actually laughed, still thinking that surely, the steps would come back to me, but no, they never did.  I really didn't know the number at all and remained frozen in the otherwise-dancing front row throughout it.  I remember wondering if it would be any less embarrassing just to walk off the stage, but I decided to stay up there instead. 

After what seemed like an hour, the song ended, and my next memory is of standing in the girls' restroom cringing from the almost flesh-eating mortification one can likely only feel as a teenager.  Jolene was in there there too and asked me what was wrong, and although I barely even knew her--it was her brother with whom I would graduate; I only knew Jolene from the bus rides to and from school--I spilled out the whole humiliating story, telling her I felt so stupid, just so stupid.  This kind and wise-beyond-her-high-school-years girl snapped, "Val, don't you ever let yourself feel stupid!  You don't have anything to feel stupid about!  You tried to do something, and it didn't work, that's all.  It's okay!  A bunch of people probably wanted to be in the musical and were too scared even to sign up!  At least you tried!"  She was right, of course.  I still blush when I remember it--I was the only student who froze like that, after all--but my appreciation of Jolene's kindness and wisdom has always outweighed that embarrassment.  And finally, more than twenty years later, I got to tell her how much that has meant to me all this time.  She thanked me for telling her--and admitted that she didn't remember the story at all--then made me and Mom laugh when she gloated, "It's so funny because I tell my kids all the time that it doesn't matter if you win or lose as long as you do your best--And now I can go home today and tell them someone said I was right!"  Dear Jolene.  :)  

Working on Bye Bye Birdie would provide me with some of my happiest high school memories.  I ended up in the chorus as one of the singing-but-decidedly-not-dancing "townspeople," right where I belonged from the start.  The following school year, I knew from the get-go to sign up as a "villager" and not as a potential dancer for Brigadoon.  Both my choir director and Jolene were right when they said it was okay:  This is just how we learn sometimes.  Jolene's generosity that afternoon is one of the best of all my high school memories, and how sweet that I got to tell her.  ♥

Aunt Cathy

One of my friend Sommer's aunts died on Thursday, I learned Friday afternoon.  Aunt Cathy used to work at the little café inside our local Walmart store--back in the early 1990s when the hometown Walmart was not a "supercenter" and still had a tiny café near the entrance--and Sommer and I would always stop in to visit her while out running around in high school, gabbing with her between her serving other customers and really gabbing with her on slower evenings when she had more free time. The first of their family reunions that I went to, this sweet lady offered me a chair in her backyard and I sat down only to have it crash and splinter into pieces underneath me.  After various relatives helped me up off the ground, I don't know whom amongst all of us laughed the most.  Even though I had just met some of the family for the very first time, it was almost too funny to be embarrassing.  :)   When Sommer died during our last few months of high school, it was one of Cathy's daughters who was the first family member to come out to my parents' house the day it happened to talk with us, and it became my mom and I who would visit Cathy at Walmart, the three of us catching up on family news and helping each other through those horrible first weeks and months.  I last saw her in 2010--randomly bumping into her a hundred miles from her home, which made it even funnier and sweeter to us.  A huge hug, then, at our last meeting, and more laughter and family news shared before we parted.  My heart has been with her family this weekend, and I send them all so much love.  

Chocolate Sommers Day

Today is my friend Sommer's birthday, and in her memory, I've baked a small batch of what she, my mom, and I called "Chocolate Sommers," a cookie Mom used to make that Sommer loved.  Our junior and senior years of high school, Som would come home from school with me in the afternoons and, more often that not, find a sheet of them freshly-baked for her.  "Cool!"  she would shout when she heard that Mom and I had come to jokingly rename the recipe "Chocolate Sommers."  "I've never had a cookie named after me before!"  A box of chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and and 1/3 cup of vegetable oil:  So simple, and yet, such a goofy thrill for her, my friend with the Cheshire Cat grin. 

The photo above captures Sommer exactly as I always picture her, and you get a pretty good idea from it of what opposites we were too.  There I sit shying away from the camera somewhat, knees together, hands clasped, and there's my girl beside me. . ."being Sommer."  Our teachers and students who didn't know us well were always shocked to learn that Sommer and I were best friends.  She would come to class late, if it wasn't a day she'd decided to let herself have off in the first place.  She could change her own tires before most of us her age even knew how to drive.  When she felt a teacher was being unfair to her or others, she practically growled and would defend herself and anyone else who needed it.  She got kicked off the bus her junior year of high school because she had told off the driver who was letting, day after day, a young boy on the bus be bullied.  After days of intervening on the kid's behalf, fighting with the bully harassing him, and trying to get the driver to deal with it, it was Sommer, not the bully, who was told not to ride the bus anymore.  She was positively sputtering by the time she was recounting the story to me on the phone that night, and when I told her I was sorry and that yes, it was unfair and wrong, she replied that she didn't care about having to drive, she was just worried for the poor boy.   (I don't remember how that ended, but I know she raised more hell about it, as was her way, and I'm thinking parents and/or others must have talked with the driver or school personnel.)  Her heart, I always said, was as big as her mouth.  She applied for a much-wanted job in a car repair shop when she was sixteen, and when the owner made it clear that he'd feel better with a man working there instead, she argued with him about the injustice of that.  She had a wall calendar in her bedroom featuring the hunky model Fabio; Mine at the same time was probably Quotes of Comfort or Mary Engelbreit.  She remains the only person I've ever known who could walk into a room and instantly have everyone's attention.  I had always thought that idea was just a kind of writerly way of describing an outgoing person, but then Som and I became friends and I got used to seeing it happen:  She had an energy about her that made people look up, watch, and wait for her words and actions.  She had burgundy-dyed hair when we met.  She was aching to get a tattoo, but her deal with her mom was that she had to wait until she was older if she really wanted one.  "Well!" cried out our senior English teacher when she ran into us in the local mall's Hallmark store one afternoon.  "There's a dangerous duo!"  That still delights me, although now it's more because I was half of this sweet duo and not because someone teasingly deemed me edgy.  She was born just four months before me, and we were close enough in shape and weight to share clothes, but I always thought of her as being the older one and as one of the protective forces in my life.  It was easier making my way through high school as a studious introvert when I had this purple-haired  ball of fire beside me, if only because she paved the way a bit.  I was strong and capable in my own ways, of course, and helped her along, as well, although exactly how we quieter ones do that is never as obvious.  In most of our pictures together, I am positioned off to her side and a bit behind her or am otherwise unconsciously trying to hide myself a bit.  Never Sommer.  She faced the world head-on, she stood up, she stepped forward, she burst out, she led the way.   

A month or so after Som died, I was talking about this attraction of opposites friendship with another girl in our senior class, and she said that she too had always thought it was strange that we were friends.  "But," she concluded, "You could always make each other laugh.  You guys got each other hysterical."  Yes.  It breaks my heart to have to say that while I remember her speaking voice, nineteen years since I last heard it, I no longer remember the sound of her laughter.  I pause as I type that because it hurts so much.  If you woke my mom in the middle of the night and asked her what she remembered about our friendship or the time we all shared with Sommer, she'd likely instantly respond, "They were always laughing together."  One day after school, Som and I stopped at Wal-Mart and were looking at hats--I lived in hats and baseball caps in high school, so funny the phases we go through--and my mom, who had stopped there on her way home from work, heard us laughing long before she saw us.  She just followed the sound of our laughter until she found us in the store.  In one of the sweestest dreams Mom had soon after Som died, Sommer came over to the house and ran upstairs to my room and shut the door and Mom stood at the bottom of the stairs in shock saying to my dad "How can she be here, Gene?  She died!" and listening to us as we laughed together again.  " I couldn't make out anything you were saying," she told me later, "I just heard you both laughing."  The few precious dreams I've had since she died in which we're laughing at something together are amongst my own favorites.  In one, she and I were back in our junior year American history class and our teacher's lesson for the day was depressing in that it seemed to be a recitation of sad and sobering things that had occurred in the nation over the years.  After he had mentioned the umpeenth war or famine or other historical crisis, a classmate muttered, "Didn't anything good ever happen in history?!"  And Sommer, ever the smart alec, replied, "Yeah!  I was born!"  As we all giggled, I teased back, "What about me?!" and Som quickly said, "Yeah!  Val was born too!"  Nightmares and sad dreams of her death plagued me for years, but that silly dream made up for more than a few of the rough nights.  "I was born!"  Indeed, she was, my sweet girl, and oh my goodness, am I the better for it.  I would have preferred a lifetime of sharing that laughter and not just the couple years we were blessed with, but I'm old enough now to know that not everyone gets a Sommer in their life at all.  That she had to go on ahead of me, almost seems now like it should have been expected.  I have to follow her, it has been decided by something bigger than us, as I always did, combining the best of her with the best of myself as I make my way through the world that she's already finished with, and I look forward to our hug and laughter-filled reunion.  As ever, she makes it easier for me by having bounded ahead and paved the way.  

I'll catch up to her someday.  In the meantime, life goes on, and I continue to try to live mine with as much kindness and enthusiasm as I can.  It is milk with Chocolate Sommers for dessert tonight here, in honor of my mischievous and colorful friend.  She would be touched by this but would laugh, as Mike and I did this morning, over these cookies that look like they were frosted by someone who'd never decorated a cookie before.  :)  Turquoise and peach were her favorite colors--she was not a pink gingham, patchwork, and roses kind of girl, of course not, no--so that partially explains the odd frosting.  Being in too much of a hurry to let them cool before frosting them is the rest of my excuse.  Ah, well!  A heart-shaped cookie and glass-of-milk toast now for my friend.  She would be thrilled to know that Chocolate Sommers are still being baked and that she continues, in this way and others, to make life sweeter.  

Unconquerable

Today is the 16th anniversary of my best friend's death. Last year March 1st passed by almost unnoticed by me, making me think that maybe future March 1sts would be easier than they used to be, but this year the date is hurting my heart the way it used to, and I find myself reliving the play-by-play of the "original" March 1st. Likewise, the one-year mark, back in 1996, actually wasn't too bad--I wrote Sommer a letter in my journal and really felt okay--but the second anniversary found me feeling abandoned by her and again brokenhearted by the loss. Such is grief.

That second anniversary, March 1st of 1997, I was home from college for the weekend. I remember complaining off and on all day to my mom that I hadn't felt much of a connection to Sommer lately and that that was making this day even harder. I had recently transferred to a new college, after having completed my freshman year elsewhere, and I had yet to make any friends at school. It didn't seem like too much to ask, I'm sure I pointed out to Mom, for Sommer to let me know that she was still around me. I had been so lonely that fall and winter, watching seemingly every other student on campus hanging out with their own best friend. So maybe today, two years after her death, there could be a sign of some kind: A whiff of her perfume, a favorite song of ours on the radio, a sense of her hand on my shoulder--Anything.

Sommer had come through for me before since passing over, after all. One afternoon in my high school Spanish class in those first few soul-shattering weeks after she had died--and mere minutes after my teacher had thoughtfully asked how I was doing and if things were getting any easier and I had replied, trying not to cry in front of him, that no, sorry, I thought things were actually getting harder and worse--I wearily flipped open a book of Spanish literature I had been assigned in preparation for my end-of-year AP exams only to find myself looking down at a Pablo Neruda poem titled "The Dead Woman":

If suddenly you do not exist,
if suddenly you no longer live,
I shall go on living.
I do not dare,
I do not dare to write it,
if you die.
I shall go on living.
For where a man has no voice,
there, my voice.
Where blacks are beaten,
I cannot be dead.
When my brothers go to prison
I shall go with them.
When victory,
not my victory,
but the great victory comes,
even though I am mute I must speak;
I shall see it come even
though I am blind.
No, forgive me.

If you are not living,
if you, beloved, my love,
if you have died,
all the leaves will fall in my breast,
it will rain on my soul night and day,
the snow will burn my heart,
I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,
my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, but

I shall go on living,
because above all things
you wanted me unconquerable,

and, my love, because you know that I am not only a man
but all mankind.
 

Upon reading it, I got up from my desk and carried the book back to my teacher, pointing at the poem with shaky hands. "Can you believe this?" I tried to whisper, since it was silent reading time. "Look at this! Have you seen this before?!" He quickly scanned the poem and nodded at me, understanding what I was and wasn't saying. By the end of the class period, I had memorized the poem and its beautiful lines had become my mantras. "If you are not living, if you my beloved, my love, if you have died. . .But I shall go on living. . .You wanted me unconquerable."
 

But two years later, March 1st of 1997 was passing without a sign from Sommer, and long after my parents and younger brother had gone to bed that night, I finally gave up on it and decided to turn in too.  I stayed in bed for awhile but could tell I wasn't going to fall asleep any time soon, so I grabbed a blanket and tiptoed back downstairs to watch TV in the living room. I wasn't much of a TV-watcher then--I haven't been since I was a kid--and I didn't have a TV in my dorm room back at college either, so I had no idea what was on, and I didn't care. The first channel I stopped at was showing a film I hadn't seen or even heard of before, and I soon found that it wasn't by accident that it was on: The movie was Truly, Madly, Deeply.  In it, Nina is grieving the recent death of her boyfriend, Jamie, and Jamie returns to her both to show her that he's still there for her and to help her move on with her life. This is it! My sign! I wanted to scream upstairs to my mom, but the rest of the house was asleep. I settled back onto the couch cuddled up in my blanket, stunned.

And then I was yet more stunned to hear Spanish being spoken in the movie, and to hear Nina saying to Jamie, "I know this poem." As I sat and watched, with a chill moving through me, Jamie nodded back at her, and continued reciting the poem's verses in Spanish while Nina translated them back to him in English.  I knew this poem too:

"If you are not living,
If you, my beloved, my love,if you have died. . .
But I shall go on living."

My spine tingled. This is Sommer. Sommer is here. Sommer is here! This time, I didn't even want to call upstairs to Mom. This was my time with my friend. As loyal as ever, she had not forgotten me, she had not abandoned me, and she had not forgotten how to make me feel better. After the movie ended, I remained on the couch in the dark silent living room, just thinking. Had I come back downstairs to watch TV even five minutes later, I'd have missed it. Before heading back upstairs to go to bed later, I would tear that day's TV schedule page from the newspaper to save as a reminder to myself: Death does not end relationships. All those I've loved and lost are still with me. Love is eternal. And I shall go on living. ♥

(The Spanish begins around the 3:25-mark.)

 

To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose, the next best. ~ William Thackeray

 My friend Sommer would have turned thirty-one today. Every night as I settle onto my pillow and prepare to sleep, I see her forever-teenage-face reflected in my now-thirty-year-old one. I keep a favorite picture of her framed over my side of the bed, so her giggly smile is always one of the last things I see each day. I have never thought of her as a "guardian angel."  To me, she remains "just" Sommer, "just" my best friend, "just" an awesome soul I have been blessed enough to love, but I am cannot help be comforted by the belief that she somehow still loves me and looks out for me. 

A Rod McKuen poem I found a few months after Sommer died still speaks to me tonight just as it did in the summer of '95:

"...And now I love you
and I live you as well
because of you
I am larger than myself 
I am as big as both of us
I live because I love you"

I would have preferred, of course, to have had a lifetime of "in-person time" together, but some people never have a Sommer in their lives at all, so I try to recognize my blessings as such and to be grateful for them. The older I get, the more often I look at that picture above my bed and find myself thinking, "My gosh! I got to love this giggly and sweet person! I got to be one of her friends! How awesome is that!" It is Sommer's birthday, but as the saying goes, her presence is my present. 

♥