The Weekend

So on Friday I got in the car and Eddie is already blasting the Grateful Dead before we pull out of the driveway and guess what song is playing and guess what verse comes on??...Yes, "Truckin", so weird since I ended my last blog with this line!! It came on again as we drove onto campus a few hours later. Really weird and great. We stopped and saw Charlie on the way up to Massachussetts. He has a big scar on the side of his head. It was hard to look at and breath at the same time. He was smiling and talking and laughing. While I was there, 2 packages arrived for him and 2 people dropped by the house with flowers and gifts. I can't tell you what it feels like to know my friend is so well taken care of up there in Rhode Island. Amy seemed a little bit back to herself. Her "normal" voice is returning and we talked about some other things we haven't spoken about in a while. I mean, when your son has a brain tumor, that really stays the focus of most or all the conversations...but on Friday it seemed OK to branch out a little bit onto other subjects. I don't know if this necessarily means anything, but we did.
What I mostly thought about while I was there was the grip that this little 9 year old boy has had on all of us. The outcome of his surgery affected everything for the people who love him. Here he was shooting marshmellows out of the marshmellow gun we brought him, having absolutely no idea that all of our lives, to different degrees, were hanging on the tread of this surgery and his recovery. I found myself talking to him in a calm and sensible voice about the Red Sox but the voice in my heart was silently screaming "Charlie!! Thank God you are OK!! Thank God you are here walking around shooting marshmellows! You scared the crap out of us and brought us to the brink of fear, a place so dark that your mom was crippled even by the thought of such darkness. Oh, Charlie you have no idea the prayers and tears and fear and gratidtude you have provoked in all of us...you will never know until you have your own babies and they walk around with your heart in thier hand wearing a blue Red Socks hat and khaki shorts!!"  But I kept my voice steady and tried to appear relaxed as he showed me the hundreds of cards he has recieved in the past few weeks. When my Madison was born in 1999, Amy sent me a card that said "Motherhood is living the rest of your life having your heart walk around outside your body." That's what I witnessed on Friday seeing Charlie. It was like Amy and Garrett were back from the brink, a brink they only had to visit and got to come away from. So many other parents don't get to come back from the brink and I am so grateful my friends got to come back.
We left Rhode Island and got to campus in time for cocktail hour. We stayed in the dorm rooms with one my good friend Doug and his wife Beth. The weekend was awesome, even though it rained. It was just so strange to see people 20 years later! Everyone changed but hadn't changed and it was soo good to see everyone again. I was not haunted at all by things of the past...it was impactful having Eddie there with me, meeting people from the only phase of my life he was not familiar with. This in and of itself helped me to feel more and more comfortable being back there. I loved having him be a part of it all.  The whole weekend was so much easier and better than I anticipated. Late night on Saturday some alumni from the class of 2006 (yes, only 5 years out of college) came to hang out in our room (only because they ran out of beer), I had another conversation with a 20-something with their whole life ahead of them. He has been dating his girlfriend for 3 years and is thinking about proposing to her. He was also talking about what career path to take and where to live...much like my conversation a few nights before with Meredith, I was reminded of those 2 phases of life, knowing the outcome of your adult life  vs. just starting to create it. I loved that I got to get up off the disgusting couch I was sitting on in the common room and walk down the disgusting hallway to my disgusting dorm room and get into a single bed next to my husband with a voicemail on my phone from my 3 girls. Many people want to go back to those days when there was more freedom and less responsibility. Not me. I like the freedom that the responsibility of a family has given me. I like that although I know many of my "unknowns" of my 20's, the story of my life is still unfolding. I got to spend a weekend with people I have loved in the past. I am grateful to reconnect with so many of them who I knew when my now "knowns" where then my "unknowns." I was also grateful to come home to a house that doesn't smell like stale beer and actually be able to sit down on the toilet seat to pee. These things go down, thank God, as two of the "knowns" of my life.