These imponderable mysteries...
So it is, that life is a mystery, and all I can do is live it, every day, as fully as I can.
After my brief reference to this story in an earlier post, those of you who only know me in Livejournal-land have asked me to clarify: My parents, as teenage newlyweds, found out they were expecting their first child. My mother had a vaccination against rubella before she knew she was pregnant, and five or six doctors in Atlanta advised abortion, since the rubella vaccine has been known to cause serious birth defects including deafness, mental retardation, and unformed limbs if the fetus even makes it full-term. Nothing was certain, but the outlook was statistically grim.
But my parents decided they couldn't live with the thought of termination, and decided to pray, knowing it could mean a lifetime of caring for a special needs child.
And then during one of those freak blizzards Atlanta rarely gets, I was born, with ten fingers and toes, with healthy hearing and vision and mental capacity.
I don't know why, you know? I'm thankful. So thankful.
And then, today: Virginia Tech, and the deep sorrow that our state feels right now. I finally found out tonight that my friend Felix (my boss' son) is ok. He's a sophomore at Tech and lives in a dorm, though I don't know which one. And who knows what he saw or heard, or which of his friends may have died today. The grief is palpable here: we're only an hour and forty-five minutes away, so everyone knows someone there.
This afternoon, I went to the bank. My friend Jay, who runs the Mezzanine with his fiance Michelline, came in just as I was finishing up my transaction. As I left the bank, police were waving everyone to keep going down the block, but it seemed more like a routine traffic deal than anything. I found out a few minutes later that there was a bomb threat, that the entire bank building was being evacuated (at 20 floors, it's the tallest building in Lynchburg).
Within an hour, all was straightened out. I don't know what happened, but Jay and I were a bit shaken. Before the SWAT team evacuated everyone,he thought at first he was a hostage in a holdup because a woman came in yelling for everyone to stay inside.
After the scares faded and I tended to the business of life (shot 40 actors' headshots today for the upcoming show), I took a cab home. The woman driving and I talked about living every day, about not taking it for granted. She said just the other night she was supposed to take one last call before her shift ended, but her car broke down on the way there. The car would have probably made it ok for the ride, but instead of risking it, another cabbie followed her and picked up the guy instead. And on the way back, the other cab driver was robbed at gunpoint.
He was a seasoned cab driver, she said, and was able to deal with the situation without harm. But she would have had no clue what to do. She said that night she forgot to go the bank before work, and so she had all of her fares plus whatever she'd had in her purse--money for her car payment, and it would have been gone--and who knows what else could have happened.
So tonight, I am left wondering about these things, and about how little we actually control in our lives, though we like to think we can organize our lives, as if the more effort and planning we put into our days will somehow pay off in a pain-free existence with a storybook ending.
Brian may get redeployed in June. My dad's currently tied to a unit that's also scheduled to leave this summer, even though he already transferred to the local base--that's just Army red tape for you. I'm not sure what I'll do if all three of my men are in Iraq...
For tonight, I would like nothing more than to soak in my clawfoot tub, light some candles, listen to some Over the Rhine or perhaps read some poetry, and remind myself that life can, even should be beautiful, even when we are faced with the ugliness of it all.
After my brief reference to this story in an earlier post, those of you who only know me in Livejournal-land have asked me to clarify: My parents, as teenage newlyweds, found out they were expecting their first child. My mother had a vaccination against rubella before she knew she was pregnant, and five or six doctors in Atlanta advised abortion, since the rubella vaccine has been known to cause serious birth defects including deafness, mental retardation, and unformed limbs if the fetus even makes it full-term. Nothing was certain, but the outlook was statistically grim.
But my parents decided they couldn't live with the thought of termination, and decided to pray, knowing it could mean a lifetime of caring for a special needs child.
And then during one of those freak blizzards Atlanta rarely gets, I was born, with ten fingers and toes, with healthy hearing and vision and mental capacity.
I don't know why, you know? I'm thankful. So thankful.
And then, today: Virginia Tech, and the deep sorrow that our state feels right now. I finally found out tonight that my friend Felix (my boss' son) is ok. He's a sophomore at Tech and lives in a dorm, though I don't know which one. And who knows what he saw or heard, or which of his friends may have died today. The grief is palpable here: we're only an hour and forty-five minutes away, so everyone knows someone there.
This afternoon, I went to the bank. My friend Jay, who runs the Mezzanine with his fiance Michelline, came in just as I was finishing up my transaction. As I left the bank, police were waving everyone to keep going down the block, but it seemed more like a routine traffic deal than anything. I found out a few minutes later that there was a bomb threat, that the entire bank building was being evacuated (at 20 floors, it's the tallest building in Lynchburg).
Within an hour, all was straightened out. I don't know what happened, but Jay and I were a bit shaken. Before the SWAT team evacuated everyone,he thought at first he was a hostage in a holdup because a woman came in yelling for everyone to stay inside.
After the scares faded and I tended to the business of life (shot 40 actors' headshots today for the upcoming show), I took a cab home. The woman driving and I talked about living every day, about not taking it for granted. She said just the other night she was supposed to take one last call before her shift ended, but her car broke down on the way there. The car would have probably made it ok for the ride, but instead of risking it, another cabbie followed her and picked up the guy instead. And on the way back, the other cab driver was robbed at gunpoint.
He was a seasoned cab driver, she said, and was able to deal with the situation without harm. But she would have had no clue what to do. She said that night she forgot to go the bank before work, and so she had all of her fares plus whatever she'd had in her purse--money for her car payment, and it would have been gone--and who knows what else could have happened.
So tonight, I am left wondering about these things, and about how little we actually control in our lives, though we like to think we can organize our lives, as if the more effort and planning we put into our days will somehow pay off in a pain-free existence with a storybook ending.
Brian may get redeployed in June. My dad's currently tied to a unit that's also scheduled to leave this summer, even though he already transferred to the local base--that's just Army red tape for you. I'm not sure what I'll do if all three of my men are in Iraq...
For tonight, I would like nothing more than to soak in my clawfoot tub, light some candles, listen to some Over the Rhine or perhaps read some poetry, and remind myself that life can, even should be beautiful, even when we are faced with the ugliness of it all.