Collection of essays by journalist/prosecutor
Excerpt
Girls in the Graveyard
I was basking like a lizard in the warm Phoenix sun. Charlie, the nuttier, more persistent half of the canine duo keeping me company on the patio around the turquoise backyard pool hovered, quivering with excitement. He was a big, anxious golden retriever, achingly poised between conflicting imperatives hang on to his prize, the drool-covered tennis ball gripped tightly in his jaws, or let go of it long enough for me to pick it up and throw it across the yard yet again. The conflict within him played out for anyone to see, as he whipsawed back and forth in front of me, incapable of just choosing a course of action and sticking with it. Bear, an enormous Australian shepherd, hung back and watched with a wolfish stare on his black and silver face.
Two thousand miles away in Wisconsin, a legion of television weather forecasters were beating the steady drum of dire blizzard warnings, unsafe road conditions, imminent airport closings and general natural mayhem. I took another swig of my diet green iced tea and adjusted my spaghetti straps to get the most southern exposure for the effort. I tossed the ball again for Charlie and shut my eyes. A woodpecker rapped persistently at a telephone pole nearby, and a mockingbird called from the edge of the yard. It was good to be here again, and I felt my back muscles start to melt into the mesh seat.
“Here” was my friend Annie B’s house in Arizona, and it was her patio furniture I was nestled into so comfortably, feeling the warmth radiating off the white stucco walls behind and around me. It was my second visit in not very long. The first had come barely a year earlier, when I invited myself down to escape the serious hoopla at my office that would invariably accompany my being there for my fiftieth birthday black “over the hill” balloons, silver streamers, and a stuffed buzzard mounted to the back of my chair. The girls in the front of the office take pride in their work. I’d seen it happen, I knew it was coming, the only way to beat the game was to leave town. I hadn’t seen Annie B in fifteen years, but she and her husband Vance welcomed me with open arms and started the margaritas flowing as soon as I got there. For the record, I successfully dodged the stuffed buzzard.
Now I was back, along with another friend, Cathy, who’d flown in at the same time from the Twin Cities for some “girlfriend time.” The three of us carbon-date back to our first year in college together three decades before. Same dorm, same floor of the same dorm, just a few doors apart, some of the same rambunctious and/or embarrassing memories still woven tightly like threads in the varied tapestries of our lives. We’ve all assembled good lives, with homes and loved ones and good jobs and great pets and wonderful friends and a sense of purpose and integrity.
But while the ability to connect with people and forge lasting connections and friendships all along the way is the stuff that makes like worth living and keeps our little hearts happily beating sometimes there’s just something really special about getting together with friends who have known you long enough to know where the bones are buried. And who were there, in fact, when you buried them.
I’m not talking anything with a felony status. But lord, it is good to have history!
As befitting the dignity of a graveyard, the bones will remain undisturbed here. Not that there was much dignity associated with some of those bones in the first place. Discretion and circumspection and prudence are not typically the hallmarks of first year college students, and we were no exception to the rule. Students of history will recall that the drinking age was eighteen back then, and every university function came with its own free-flowing keg. Or two. And plastic cups by the hundreds.
As our lives went on, our “bones” involved more adult-style lapses and heartaches: failed romances and failed marriages, missed opportunities and questionable judgments and at least one miscarriage, uncertainties and tears, confessions and agonizing choices. And always, the knowledge that no matter how we reinvented ourselves personally or professionally, no matter how much we morphed deliberately or by chance into the confident, competent women light years removed from those fresh-faced young girls years later we could instantly touch that flickering spirit of optimism and newness again simply with the words “do you remember when?”
I’m back now from Phoenix, though there are plenty of reminders. A bar of lavender soap bought at the farmer’s market bringing me right back there into the desert sunlight and fresh air when I step into the shower. A pair of earrings shaped like coyotes baying at the full moon. Some lemons from the tree in Annie B’s front yard, sliced into my tea in the morning. They bring back memories of lovely dinners, and frozen maragaritas made with oranges picked from the trees in the back yard, of conversation and coffee and disclosure and brutal honesty and laughter and a fabulous Rembrandt art exhibit that took our breath away.
But they also remind me of even deeper things, and richer connections, and forgiveness and acceptance and a sense of celebration and bearing witness. And that extraordinary gift only truly comes when you know where the bones are buried.
Copyright 2008 Mary Wagner. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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