We're All Humans, Aren't We?

What’s with the weather today? 45 degrees and rainy after three days of
sun and warm 70 degree weather. I guess it’s not summer just quite yet,
seeing as it’s April. Is spring even officially here? Well, bad weather
or not, I’m in a wonderful mood.

On Sunday, Amanda finally met the mom. We had a nice lunch at Baker’s
Square with my mom and her boyfriend after church. I’m glad to report
that the lunch went well, although I never had a doubt about it. It
wasn’t like any of the strange, Meet the Parents
type thing. (Although Amanda and I are both somewhat skeptical about
meeting the whole extended family since we both have… unusual
families.) Mom liked her a lot. Enough to send me a text message on my
cell saying so. She never does that. Ever.

After lunch, since the weather was gorgeous, we decided to go find a
forest preserve or a park somewhere. (Hey, if anyone knows of a good
park around here to go to with swings and everything, please let me
know.) We both stopped over at our places to change out of our Sunday
clothes and headed to a forest preserve I knew of with a gorgeous view
of a lake. There were a lot of people there and I didn’t bring a
blanket, so we ended up sitting on a park bench, talking.

We had to cut our time there short because she had another performance
with her quintet in Indiana. I had to wait patiently for four hours (!)
before I saw her again later that night and we ended up watching Mona Lisa Smile
at my place. I thought it was alright, a bit heavy handed with the
moral lessons that we were supposed to “learn.” It didn’t help that we
had to sit on the crappy loveseat in my apartment because Doug’s
fiancee was sleeping on the couch. I love that couch.

Monday, I had to endure work that I started last weekend
and I’m finally finishing it up today (thank God!). I was able to get
in two rounds of frisbee golf with my best friend, Mike, after work.
Went home, picked up Amanda for some ice cream (everyone should try the
Girl Scout Samoan Cookie flavor from Edy’s. It…is…awesome…!).
Watched some Family Guy and
then spent the rest of the night on my computer, checking out old
pictures and stuff we had written in the past. Some of it was
embarrassing. (Let’s just say I had an unfortunate fixation on a
certain TV show when I was in high school.)

It was awesome (superific?) getting to know each other a little bit
better. Pictures, old poems, stories that we shared about certain
things, older Xanga entries, all of that stuff really is a window into
the past. It’s amazing how far God takes us in one year (or less!) but
it’s even more staggering when you reach and look into the past.

Last Saturday before we went to Lake Katherine, I took Amanda on a
mini-detour through my old neighborhood in Palos Park. You know, when
someone’s murdered and the police suspect they’re in a river, they
bring out those boats that dredge the rivers, digging up the silt and
the dirt on the bottom looking for the body. The result of that
dredging is this massive cloud of formerly settled dirt swirling in the river.
That’s how I felt when I drove through that neighborhood. My chest hurt
and my heart felt like it stopped for a few seconds (it very well may
have) as I turned on the street I spent most of my childhood growing up
on. I looked at my old house. Everything was the same except for the color
of the garage door and the deck. They still had the swing set, the
shed, the old fence around where I weed whacked every Saturday. I
pointed out different things to Amanda and told her small ancedotes,
like how that house used to give out apples for Halloween or that used
to be my bus stop and that and there…

It was this big cloud of memories that had suddenly been violently
stirred up and it was a lot to take in (let’s just say I won’t be driving through this neighborhood again for a long, long time). My parents’ divorce, moving out
of the house for good, hanging out with my friends, bonfires in the
backyard, mowing the grass, playing basketball in the driveway with my
friends, shooting my B.B. gun at aluminum soup cans on the side of the
shed, swinging on that swing set, shoveling the snow off the driveway,
barbecues, and on and on.

Sometimes God interrupts our life and our happiness to take us on a
completely different path where He wants us to go. And somewhere along
the way, several years later when I wasn’t looking, God introduced me
to a greater happiness than I had ever known before.

She was sitting next to me on that drive through the neighborhood.