A Million Little Pieces
One of my best pals in high school was a kid named Mark. I'd known him in junior high as the sweet sidekick of the guy who became my high school boyfriend (hi, David!), and although he (Mark) was always a Good Mormon Boy, he usually tagged along on our suburban-teenager escapades, and many times he even not-so-reluctantly participated. Oh, we were so very rebellious, you guys. This one time? We stayed out twenty minutes past curfew? And we almost got in trouble from our parents! Couldn't you just die?! Seriously, we were sooooo bad!
And yet, in context (i.e., Utah), we actually were kind of naughty on occasion, and I was always extra tickled when sweet little Mark would find his special place in our shenanigans. For instance, while we would drive through sleepy neighborhoods on weekend nights looking for trouble (i.e., somewhere scenic to eat our chicken nuggets), Mark would, at our request, stick his trumpet out the sunroof of David's car and play "Reveille" at the darkened houses. I also think he was driving the car we were chasing when we got pulled over for "impersonating a cop," even though the flashing light we'd stuck to the top of the car (and that the officer confiscated) was orange, not red, and even though Mark knew it was us in the car, commanding him to pull to the shoulder, sir, through the authority of a megaphone.
Mark was kind and quietly funny, and also extremely patient. Example: A devoted Mormon, he never stopped speaking to me no matter how many times I called his father "Brigham" (his name is Paul, but he had nine or ten kids, so...), which I realize now probably wasn't as funny to Mark as it was to me but, ah, bygones. The best photo I have of Mark is of him mid-trot in a full-dress marching band uniform--muppet-fur beehive hat and all--that we'd rescued from the high school dumpster after the music department decided to clean house. He was the only one of us who fit the uniform, and although he protested wearing something that had just come from the garbage, he did it anyway because Mark was, above all, a hell heck of a good sport.
At the end of sophomore year, and at the height of our friendship, Mark and I swapped yearbooks during the yearbook signing party in the cove outside the cafeteria. I took his book, opened up to the perfect page, prepared myself to compose something Deep and Meaninful, and then...drew a total blank. What do you say to someone who has been one of your best friends, who has adventured with you through some of the tenderest years of your life, who has put up with your stupid jokes and stupider stunts? Mark returned my yearbook with a sweet Markian inscription--it ended with the post script: "You better not ever forget me. You can call me when I'm 80 years old"--and I returned his to him with the promise that I'd get to it later, when I could concentrate, when I would have more time, when I could at least attempt to do some small justice to our big friendship.
I meant it, and Mark knew I meant it, and yet no matter how many times he reminded me about the yearbook, I never got around to it, never even signed my name under a scribbled promise to hang out over the summer or to be Best Friends Forever. Mark was my Number Two friend that year, and I never got to say express that to him from my perspective and in the best way I knew how--on paper. By the time the next yearbook party came around, his inscription to me said, among other things, "I miss seeing you this year. I wish you the best of luck in all that you do. Love, Mark," and I'm sure mine was similarly short and infinitely more wistful because I felt like I could have done more to show him how important he was to me, even then, when our class schedules and the pull of our separate futures had come between us. I hope he remembers how much fun we had.
***
These days I wish I had more time, I wish I could concentrate, I wish I had it in me to do some small justice to my experience during these way-too-fast babydays, but I don't. And it's not even that I want to blog, I want to write, which is something else altogether. Wombat is eight months old and change now, and he climbs over everything and he loves getting his teeth brushed and he finally ate catfood (it would have been foolish to deny its inevitability), and he knows "Where's Linus?" and "Where's Daddy?" and sometimes "Which one is the pig?" in his Farm book, which makes him laugh out loud so long as the spread is open to pictures of animals and not something dumb like tractors or work boots. I take videos and photos of him nearly every day and cross my fingers with as I press the shutter, hoping these small records will be, years from now, cue enough to trigger the huge iceberg of experience and emotion and daily joy and frustration that float underneath the surface below that tiny fragment I've captured in pixels and digital sound waves. I hope I'm doing the right thing in collecting a multitude of tiny moments as a way of constructing a larger picture. It's one of the ways I'm learning that grand, sweeping philosophies and carefully constructed plans for the future will not make the difference a thousand tiny, practical gestures will in shaping a life.
I really enjoyed this post. I think about this all the time, am I doing enough, am I remembering enough, am I writing enough? It never feels like enough. I always feel I could be doing more. I always want to sleep less and do more and then I fall asleep without even bothering to do the damn dishes, let alone frame a picture or two of my child.
But yes the tiny things make the life. Yes yes yes.
I totally thought this post was going to end with "and then Mark was killed in a car crash last weekend". I'm glad it's less morbid than that. I know the feeling though - I have so many friends that mean more to me than I can express in words, but I have awesome memories of them, and hopefully they have awesome memories of me, so we can still look back and smile.
Yes. Yes is all I can say to this post. I feel the same way quite regularly.
My best friend from school and I tried to keep in touch, but we went in different directions and the last time I saw her, we had a huge fight and were so far from our idyllic friendship days as could be. I try to remember her as what she was: My best friend during som very difficult years, the one who saved me when she reached out her hand and became my friend. Never mind we fought at the end - we have too much good stuff between us to remember the bad.
This was so lovely. I hope I was someone's Mark.
I agree with Teri -- reading that Mark story, I was bracing for the worst.
The last sentence of this entry sums up perfectly what I, too, have been learning this year.
You are an amazing writer.
This was a really beautiful story. I am right there with you.
(And I'm with Teri: I was so worried that the Mark story was leading up to something tragic. Whew.)
Nah, Mark is totally alive and well and on teh Facebook with his wife and, of all things, a beer. Seeing that aaaaaaalmost makes me want to get on teh Facebook myself...
Well, you have to take enough photos so that you'll capture at least several embarrassing ones for putting in your son's senior yearbook.
I agree with Teri - I was very afraid that story was going to turn into an entirely different kind of regret.
I so often get tangled up in worrying about the details that I can't see the forest for the trees, or maybe not even the damn trees themselves. This was a wonderful description of, I think, a similar sentiment, though when you write about it, it sounds pretty, and when I do, it sounds like I have an anxiety problem :)
I just learned that an old friend of mine has died, but she really wasn't old. Just 40 and a mother of three kids.
Can't say that we were best friends, but we shared a number of cool experiences over the years. And though it has been forever since our last adventure, her death made me realize just how much did happen.
Good friends are invaluable.
Hello, this is a principallyoutstanding blog post. In theory I'd wish to jot down like this too - taking time and real work to make a great post.!!!. but what can I say.!!!. I procrastinate alot and by no means appear to acquire something done. Thank You