The Eyes of the Beholder

One recent muggy summer evening I came home from a scrape-your-back- side-hard day at work to see an inbox message on Facebook: “I’m talking junk about you online here. Check out Safety Cab University.”

I froze for a Nano-second. What could my friend Chuck, be writing about me? I’m a beyond-middle-age woman (unless I live to be 104 years-old), with two children, a hubby, a spastic dog and a mortgage. What’s to write about? But you know me, curiosity won out and I keyed the words Safety Cab University into the search box on Facebook. By the time I finished reading, I was in tears, happy, memory-embraced tears. I saw my past self in a way that I would have never envisioned. This is the “junk” he wrote about me.

“She was beautiful, and crying in my back seat. I don't remember what had her so upset, but I asked her if she wanted to talk about it. She did.

Therapy at $1.20 per mile. That's what cab drivers do. Part of the job.

She talked of matters dear to her heart, and even though she was crying, she was SO beautiful. When we got to her destination, we sat a few minutes more talking about it, although for the life of me I don't remember now what it was.

She was so beautiful, and I was a young single guy with a few bucks, a cool apartment, and an elderly Pontiac convertible. I wasn't ugly; I looked pretty good actually, and my mother taught me to dress well. I asked her if she wanted to go out some time and talk some more.

She did.

We dated for a year or two, and I love her to this day. She is among my favorite Facebook friends. I should point out though; the guy she did marry a few years later is much bigger than me. He is a Facebook friend too, but I don't think I am saying anything here he hasn't known for years.

She was in my back seat, and crying, and she was SO beautiful.”

I was undone. I stepped away from the computer and muttered to myself, “Silly jerk. I never knew.”  I didn’t know, and it was a kindness beyond description that he had written those words.

He doesn’t know that while he was not the love of my life, I loved him. I hope you blush Chuck, because no words will ever convey what a buck-twenty a mile therapy did for me. I was a bit lost. My father had died a few years before and my beautiful Mama and I were at an impasse. We didn’t get along. I was young and headstrong and unable to understand what my mother had lost. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, or what I wanted to be. I felt, overly dramatic I’m sure, that I was useless. On top of that, the man-child I had pinned my hopes on had become less than. He would offer advice the likes of; I needed to lose weight, I should wear a better bra (I swear to the heavens this is true.). He stated, “Why should we hold hands all the time, we’ve been dating forever,” and the real kicker was when he said I should get over the loss of my father. So I became a real witch. Not his fault, just my choice of reaction, which wasn’t pretty.

So into a cab I went one evening, never expecting the kindness of a stranger. It happened like he said. He asked me out, and I said sure. Our first date was wonderful. He came to pick me up at the appointed time, but our home was built like a fortress, back when walls were a foot and a half deep, and I never heard him knock. He went down the street to a pay phone and called me, telling me to answer the door. I rushed out the front door of the house and met him halfway on the sidewalk where he picked me up and twirled me around. We walked back to his Pontiac convertible, top down, and went to The Jade Garden on Hillsborough Street in Raleigh. During the course of dinner, the wine bottle fell over and half a bottle’s contents wound up soaking his pant-leg. He commented that the rest of him was fine but, “Now my leg is drunk!”  He made me laugh. He made me comfortable in my own skin.

After dinner we went to Pullen Park for a walk around the lake. We talked and laughed, and talked some more. At one point we climbed the stairs that led to a platform overlooking the park. He stood there, addressing a phantom crowd. “I’m overwhelmed you have all come to see me.” He continued on, and that’s when I stood beside him and started to pantomime doing sign language, as if to translate for the ghostly crowd below. He laughed so hard. It was a belly laugh worthy of award. He took me home, top down, wind weaving its fingers through our hair. A peck goodnight and he was gone. We dated a while, and I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that it was a worthy adventure.

It’s a kind of blessing after all these many years, to be able to look back and tell my younger self that life was good. You come through sadness and challenge and along the way meet those who make your life richer for their having been there. Sometimes it takes ages to understand, and to see oneself in the eyes of others. Thank you my dear friend for showing me what you saw. I love you back, and you know it. By the way, the husband approved.

(Chuck Morton is a talented musician and writer. He has witty narratives of his adventures in a cab on Facebook. Check out Safety Cab University and click like, because I think you will.)

My Mama and the Sister-Lady

The box of photographs fell to the floor when I bumped into the cedar chest. I had promised to have all the pictures scanned long ago. They are the last links to our past lives, other than each other, my brother, my sisters and I. Each photo has a memory tucked inside it, waiting for one of us to tell. I leaned over to swipe the pile back into the box, to get them out of sight before I was distracted by them and their stories, but it was too late.

A pixie face in a nun’s wimple peaked up at me, as if admonishing me not to be in such a hurry to bury the past. Sister Margaret Marie, my Mama’s buddy and my second grade teacher, was staring at me from a Suburban School photo. Suburban came to Sacred Heart Elementary every year to chronicle our lives. My mother taught kindergarten there, and we have a progression of photos from her years of teaching. Sister Margaret Marie had signed the back of her photo, “To Anna, Ain’t we something!” Just like that, I remembered my mother and her, heads together, two school girls in teachers’ guise, planning trouble.

It was right after school and I was looking for my mother’s car, hoping I could go to my “cool” sister Regina’s apartment. Mama wasn’t in her car but on the steps of the convent with her head down, listening to Sister Margaret Marie. Sister Margaret barely hit five feet in height and was the shape of a rubber ball, rosy cheeked with a few wisps of salt and pepper hair just sticking out from her wimple. She and Mama were grinning like loons and I knew something was up. Turned out we were going to run an “errand” that entailed eating Chinese food at three o’clock in the afternoon.

That was a first. I never had Chinese food, let alone gone to a restaurant with a nun. It was one of many firsts. One Saturday, Mama wasn’t home and when she did walk in she was wearing a cover up and a bathing suit. Mama didn’t take off and go sunbathing. In fact, Mama didn’t take off at all. I was a little off balance, and my feeling of vertigo doubled when she told us all about the day she spent with the “sisters.”  Someone had lent their house for the day for the teachers at the Cathedral to “let their hair down.” I was only vaguely aware that nuns were people, let alone that they could let their hair down. This was in the very late sixties, early seventies at best. I was a tow-headed kid who couldn’t stop talking, but the story Mama told us that day had me speechless.

“Did you know Sister Catherine Regina used to be a Rockette?” Mama was breathless. “She dove into the pool and it was like poetry, and then here comes Margaret Marie (Whoa, wait a minute, my Mom was on a first name basis with a nun!), and she just runs like a maniac towards the pool and yells ‘CANNONBALL!’ and torpedoed into the pool!”  My mind was reeling, nuns that could swim, nuns that were dancers, nuns who wore, gasp! Bathing suits! To tell you the truth, I was a bit jealous that Mama had somehow broken into this inner circle of the sisters. She saw them for what they were; dedicated to a life of giving in a way that most of us can’t comprehend, and human just the same.

When school was over for the year, the Sisters would stay in the convent for another week or two, cleaning out the classrooms, and then packing up to go to their Mother House. That was when Sister Margaret Marie and my Mama would sneak away, saying they were running yet more “errands”. Because I was the youngest in my family, I often got to tag along with them. I could sit in the back seat of that old Fury III and listen to them for hours. They talked about their childhoods, school, life; they talked about faith and about God, family and friendship. They were remarkable together.

One time we drove to my sister Elizabeth’s house in Willow Springs. Back then it was as far away from Raleigh as you could get in the eyes of an eleven year-old. On the way we stopped at a country store called Olive’s. The store itself was a large, white, concrete block building, and it sold farm wear and gear in droves. Sister Margaret Marie was like a child at play. She walked the aisles of “Osh Kosh” overalls and “Levi” jeans with wide eyes, feeling the fabric and cooing. She had been brought up in the country and she wanted some overalls to garden in at the Mother House so her habit wouldn’t get dirty. The old timers just stared, all except for Olive, the owner. I often wondered if it was his shape at birth that had earned him his name. He was olive shaped and ripe with enthusiasm behind his counter and he stood larger than life. To say he was a big man would have belittled him. Everything about him was huge, including his kindness. He doffed a make-believe hat when my Mama and Sister Margaret Marie walked in. I heard his sotto whisper to one of the regulars to “straighten up and show some respect, that there is a Sister-Lady.”

When Sister Margaret Marie walked to the counter with two pairs of overalls you could have heard a pin drop. Olive insisted she take them, “on the house,” and Margaret Marie grinned from ear to ear as she blessed him. You would have thought that he had been in an audience with the Pope. It was precious, it was country, it was a little piece of the South at its very best, and it was a moment I won’t forget. My Mama and “the Sister-Lady” got back into the car and Sister Margaret Marie couldn’t stop talking about how wonderful everyone was. I suppose it was in that moment I realized how very wonderful she was. She was personality, a bundle of life in black and white, dedicated and faithful in ways I am still so far from understanding. Most of all, she was my Mama’s very true friend.

When the Mother House called Sister Margaret Marie away to another assignment, I don’t recall hearing either bemoaning the situation. They wrote steady through the years, letters passing back and forth until word came that Sister Margaret Marie was in the infirmary and her prognosis broke my mother’s heart. Years after she passed my mother would still send contributions to the infirmary in Sister Margaret Marie’s name, yet she seldom spoke of her again.

As a kid, I don’t think I quite understood what was going on because of the “uniform” of a nun. Today, holding that still very colorful photo of Sister Margaret Marie in my hands, I’m struck by the power of friendship. It takes all forms, it can come at us from the most unlikely places, and if we’re lucky enough, we pass time reveling in it.