So here is a thing that is sort of surreal....Saturday night I started seeing all kinds of tweets and Facebook postings from friends in Hawaii obeying an island-wide evacuation order due to an approaching tsunami. As I was reading up on the news they kept mentioning that the last such order was March of 2011 on the heels of the earthquake in Japan.
That's right, the same tsunami warning that sent my pals and I to spend the night in our rental car in the parking lot of the Honolulu Temple. It was crazy to be watching all the reports and seeing their updates and remembering the backseat of that Ford Focus lighting up with all kinds of messages and updates from our friends and families making sure we were OK.
Flash forward to today and the constant checking of the internet to see what was happening on the East Coast and thinking back just a few months to my coworker Julie and I sobbing in a hotel room in Eugene because our houses were being evacuated in the face of an unpredictable fire.
It is a bizarre thing when the place you are, or the place you aren't but your house IS, takes up the 24 hour news cycle. When your phone explodes because people know where you are and want to check on you. It's not like you WANT to have those experiences and heaven knows I was pretty freaked out both times, but there is something to be said for the reminders of how much we are loved.
One of my all-time favorite movies is Lars and the Real Girl and there is a point where one of the characters asks the doctor Lars is seeing if she misses the husband she lost. She responds with, "sometimes I get so lonely I forget what day it is and how to spell my name." It may sound strange if you read this blog or follow me elsewhere on the internet but I find myself feeling that way more often the older and singler (I know that is not a word, sorry mom.) I get. I am lucky lucky to have a big wide net of people to love but when you live far away from most of them, and when you go to bed alone, it's easy for the daily grind to make you forget.
This big wide net of a life means that if something bad happens in a big place, I probably have a bestie who is in the thick of it. So this weekend and today, I made sure to reach out to all of those people I adore in Hawaii and New York to make sure their phones were blowing up too.
And then maybe I'll just try to be better in general about staying in touch. The last few months I have laid low while I try to get back into a normal life and I'm starting to feel like connecting again. It probably shouldn't take a hurricane to get me to check in eh?
3 comments:
You're forgiven. One grammar mistake a decade.
Stumbled on your blog from another's...just wanted to say I totally relate, and I don't have nearly the amazing life you do. Sometimes I wonder if the disconnect is a coping mechanism for me.
Of all the people I know that I've never met before you are right at the top of favorites. I realize this doesn't have much to do with this post except that I needed to tell you. Maybe it just means that your net might be even bigger than you might realize.
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