Tag Archives: Love

Fred and the Carnations

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It was a warm spring day, my freshman year in high school. The bus was filled with teenagers and carnations. We’d had a fundraiser at school where you could send a carnation to friend. These carnations were our proof that we had friends. The more carnations you had, the more popular you were. Maybe it was the other way around.

There was laughing and yelling and flirting. All the things you expect on a high school bus. Other than the carnations, it was a typical bus ride home.

At the first stop, the bus driver stood up. This usually meant we’d been being a little too loud. We waited to see who it was that was in trouble. Fred, our driver, was a nice old guy. He was fair, and he’d been driving most of us since elementary school, and we didn’t pay him a whole lot of attention. Fred was just part of your day. He was the first adult outside your home to greet you each morning, the guy who drove you home and wouldn’t let you get off at the wrong stop. We were rarely in trouble with Fred. When he did stand up, we listened. He had a quiet command of the bus.

Fred started to talk with us. He said it was going to be his last day driving us. Silence swept through the bus, we were not expecting this. Then, he started to cry. His cancer had come back and the doctor told him he had to stop driving. None of us had known he had cancer. If we had, our teenage minds probably would not have really thought much about it. But, here was this guy that we were just used to, that we liked, crying.

Then, he sat down and opened the door. The first group of kids started to get off the bus. At the head of the group was probably the toughest guy on the bus. He clasped Fred on the shoulder then dropped his carnation in the metal basket on the dashboard. The next kid dropped their carnation in the basket. My bus stop was the last stop; I was one of the last to get off the bus that day. Every carnation went in the basket. Not one kid failed to do this. It was our teenage way of telling Fred we loved him. It was our way of saying goodbye.

I’d never seen my peers give an adult such deep respect. Fred had touched every one of us. His quiet steady love had transported us much further than just to and from school. We never saw or heard about Fred again. I don’t remember the bus driver that replaced him. When someone says “bus driver”, I picture Fred. I plant carnations in my garden, they remind me of that bus ride and of the power love has over all of us.

Moving on in Life and Traffic

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Why is it that I find myself stuck in traffic at 10:30 PM on a Saturday? As we crawl forward at about 10 MPH, I know the answer. It is my love for someone. Someone who was at one time the person I depended on most, someone who is now focused elsewhere. I am on my way home from watching her perform. It was an honor just to be invited. To see her having such a great time and doing a fantastic job made my day.

When you run a small business, the people that work for you either are, or quickly become, your friends, your family. When one moves on, the loss is deep. Not only do you lose a valued employee, you lose the daily contact with a close friend. That was the case with me.

I love my work. I choose this life, fully and completely and sometimes I forget that the people that work with me work in my shadow. I am often startled when someone makes a decision to do something else. After all, I’m doing this because I can’t think of anything I would enjoy more.

This loss was magnified because she was there from the beginning. She was the one that helped me birth the business. There were aspects that I thought of as more hers than mine. I knew she was unhappy; I knew she needed and wanted so much more in her life. Still, I was surprised when she announced it was time to go. I was a little lost without her. It took awhile to adjust, and even today two years later, I find holes that have remained unfilled.

There will never be someone who has been with me all along. I am now the only common denominator in this business. There is strength in that fact, strength and sometimes loneliness. I have had to become stronger without her. I have had to trust myself and life little more.

Tonight, I sat in the audience and witnessed one part of her new life. I found myself smiling the whole evening. What I saw was all the strength, all the brilliance I remember working with, only bigger, stronger, happier, freer. I watched and felt the audience fall in love with her. She was in the spotlight this time, not the shadow. This was where she belonged.

My heart full, I creep up the interstate, reflecting on all the wonderful things that have come from both of us letting go.

Iced Tea Spoons

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When I was growing up, we had this strange looking silverware.  The silverware didn’t look at all like the silverware I saw in my picture books.  The forks had very small tines, the knives had no sharp edges and the spoons were very shallow and not quite round.  What I loved the most were the long slender “iced tea” spoons.  I used them anytime I could.

One Christmas, I was helping my mother get extra silverware out for a party, and ran across the spoons.  I told her how I’d always loved them and how I’d never seen silverware that had spoons even remotely like them.  That is when I learned that their official name was “iced tea spoons” and that’s when she gave them to me, all four of them.

I used the spoons happily for years.  They are great for getting yogurt out of the plastic containers; they are fun to eat ice cream with; they are great for stirring tall glasses of liquid.   I always enjoy showing them to new people.  A number of my friends now covet these spoons.

That got me thinking.  I started to look up “iced tea spoons” on the internet.  I looked through so many versions of “iced tea spoons” and never found ones that looked like mine.  My four spoons became even more precious.  I told my mother about this search of mine one day.  She remembered the name of the silverware, which was a really great clue to finding them on the internet.  I tried to find a few more so that I wouldn’t worry about how awful it would be to lose one.

It was, of course, a discontinued model.  So, I started looking on e-bay.  My birthday was a few months away, and my sister is often looking for ideas.  I figured she might like to have something very specific this year, so I suggested that to my mother, the keeper of all wish lists in the family.  I had to explain to my mother what e-bay was.

By the time my birthday came around, I had forgotten all about them.  When my mother handed me a present expecting that I knew exactly what was in it, I really had no clue.  It was such a wonderful surprise to find 6 more of these precious spoons!

The spoons are special to me.  But, more than the spoons, it’s what my mother had to do to get them.  My mother who uses her computer for e-mail and games, who calls me to help her use search engines, managed to figure out e-bay.  She actually bid on and won the spoons!  Then she had to figure out how to pay for them over the internet.  My mother figured all this out because she wanted to be the one to give me the spoons.  She wanted to make sure I got them.  That was the really big surprise for me.  That meant so much to me.

I know it’s a little weird to be so happy about some spoons.  I can’t tell you which spoons are from my childhood and which ones my mother went way out of her way to find.  But that doesn’t matter.   All of them came from my mom.  When I open the silverware drawer I see the spoons and I remember that I am loved.

Seeing Wholeness in All

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I  have this friend who is a little compulsive about where stuff belongs.  She has a specific place for all of her items and just doesn’t relax until everything is in it’s right place.   This can be a difficult way to be in the world; For her, what makes it even more difficult is that she is physically limited in her movement.  Once she gets in bed, she can’t get back out without using her call button to get an attendant to help her.

I tell you this so that you can grasp the depth of what I am going to tell you next.

I spend a lot of time with her in the evenings.  She is always already in bed when I visit, so I sit in the room with her and watch TV until she is ready to fall asleep.  At that point, I help her get all the items on her bedside table in the right place and put out a few things that she will want in the morning.

Now, I’m sure you are starting to think that I am such a nice person to do this.  Hang on a little longer.

Last night, I was in a particular mood.  As we were putting the items in their correct spot (in this case putting the lotion in just the right place by the sink, a place she can not see from her bed) I came back out of the bathroom and announced that the lotion was on the back of the toilet.  This is of course a violation of her need to have everything in the right place, and I had actually put the lotion in it’s correct place, but I just had to play a little.  Her response was something close to how someone would respond to fingernails on a chalkboard.  She knew, instinctively, that I was joking, but she couldn’t help it.

We laughed and she once again told me where the lotion should go, and I once again told her it was in the wrong place.  We laughed some more and I finally relented and told her it was in the right place.  She relaxed and we both laughed at how important it was for her to hear me say it was in the right place.  At this point, her husband got in on the game and told her he put her eyeglasses in the wrong place.  Again, we all laughed.  It’s been awhile since I have seen that big a smile on all of our faces at the same time.

This is one of the strange ways we humans tell each other how much we care.  We notice some quirk and then use it to poke a little fun.  We are essentially saying “I see you and love you the way you are.”

I notice that when we are around someone who has a physical limitation, that we are often much “too careful.”  In our attempt to not be rude, we overcompensate, and this tends to have the effect that the other person doesn’t feel seen; it feels to them like we are only seeing their limitations.  It is a fine and delicate line when someone needs physical assistance, to help with the physical and at the same time see their wholeness.

One of my closest childhood friends was severely physically limited.  The first day we met (the first day of third grade) she went home crying to her mother.  She was so happy, it had been the best day of her life; one of her classmates had gotten mad at her for not raising her hand when the teacher asked all new students to raise their hands!  That was me; I was a stickler for the rules.  What had made her so happy was that I was treating her as “normal”; I had failed to notice that she couldn’t raise her had.  I didn’t do any of that on purpose; I just didn’t see what everyone else saw when they looked at her.  Before that, it had never occurred to me how great it could be to have someone get mad at you.  For her, my getting mad, my treating her as if she was expected to follow the rules, not making an exception for her, made her feel included in life.

So, the other night when I just had to tease my friend about the location of the lotion, I was reminding her that I still know she is whole and that I love her.

At some point in all our lives we will spend time with someone who has some limitations.  Taking a little extra time to find the place inside yourselves where you can connect with their wholeness will be one of the biggest gifts you can give them, and yourself.