Quack Quack

Sugar-Free Chai Tea Latte, Coffee Cake, European Facial, Tanning Bed, Sushi, Ducks Basketball Game, Karaoke

Somewhere in between all of that…I managed to slip something in my back and now my normal Marilyn Monroe swagger has been reduced to an AARP crawl.

/sigh

On a positive note: The Ducks won the game against Arizona! We made the PAC-10.

The Music was Mine

I stab the straw into a concoction of ice and whiskey as I slowly gather my confidence. Each biting sip of the straw warming my vocal cords making the music within me begins to build. My name is called. I rise from my chair to the cheers of my friends and random applause from faces that I will never see again. My eyes sparkle and my teeth shine in my smile as I take the beat-up microphone. I can smell the swirling smoke of the cigars around me and smell the musk from the alcohol sinking into each patron's veins. The music begins.

I close my eyes letting the opening measures in their time absorb me. Facing the crowd with the power in my abdomen I open my eyes and send my voice echoing into the cold brick walls around me. The sound system picks up the depth of my vibrato as the faces of each person who has suddenly stopped what they were doing, look up and locate the creator of the song. It is my moment under the bright lights standing strong on the knotted wooden stage below me unafraid and uninhibited. Senseless.

There are no words on the screen, no written notes to follow. This is my arrangement. This moment is mine.

At the highest point of the song I feel my voice open its wings and begin soaring above and beyond. I don't see the rundown walls, air swirling in smoke and the flickering bulb in the corner threatening to go out. I only feel the music coming alive in my soul and pushing itself outward into oblivion.

As I finish my melody the euphoria I was held in is replaced with thunderous applause and cheers. People who don't understand the music enough to live it but yet can appreciate it. I am left standing alone again. I am abandoned in the reality of the world that I left for only that brief moment. The moment the music was mine.

Little Miracles

As I sit here in front of my laptop with my shoulders poised and my legs criss-crossed in front of me I ponder. How is it that when the passing of current seconds collide with seconds lived in the past you experience a moment in euphoric memory? Decades melt away like liquid dreams into a rusty drain before your eyes. You force yourself to blink and yet the clarity of the modernized past is laid out before you like it never passed. There is no timestamp on friendship. That in itself is rare and just maybe is myself experiencing a miracle.

If that is the correct definition of a miracle, than this weekend, I had an experience in the form of two rekindled friendships.

I remember you. The same black eyes that sparkled at me across our desks as we easily printed our names on the nameplate on our desks. As the rest of the class struggled to achieve the task I remember exchanging laughter in our eyes and watching your freckled cheeks turn moving to show your smile. We knew we shared something as we glanced at the nameplates. Our names will never be pronounced correctly. We were friends for that year. Then forgotten until twenty years later when we greeted each other with the same elementary school eyes concealed in our now adult faces. The topics are different today but the conversation echoes from yesterday. As you take my small hand in yours so strong now I say to you "it's good to have you back my friend".

I can still see that little spot of chipped paint on our gray locker where the combination lock had been tossed into it year after year. I remember rounding up the gang at registration so that we could all have our lockers in a solitary line. It was our little territory, our row of lockers, the girls. We were invincible back in those innocent days before parents moved us around, extra-curricular activities monopolized our time and boyfriends took capture of each moment left in between. Who would have thought that in just two precious years our little connective worlds were going to be torn apart and our friendship forgotten. Thirteen years later we sit together laughing and sharing our stories like we never lost the time in between now and then. Obvious differences from the paths we walked down stand out like that old paint on our locker and yet the trust is still as solid as that combination lock. We both still have the right numbers and can unlock them together. We raise our glasses at each other and proudly declare "let's never forget again".

Sharing time between two beautiful people from my past and reveling in the friendship we shared then and the friendship we still share now I am inspired. A year ago I was so alone, lost in my hopeless world of heartbreak, betrayl and pain. Today I walk into old doorframes and am greeted by unjudgmental faces that remember the person I was before I lost myself into that world of shadows. The remembrance of those older happy memories heals those of the painful and newer. It is bringing me back to life, one friendship, one hand and one smile at a time.

I'm finding myself again. This must be a miracle.