Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Baggage

Waiting for the luggage, Sarah and the girls are excited to be home. Talking at once ... well except for Maddie who is texting, utterly oblivious they've landed, walked half-a-mile and is now standing among a crowd of people... they're exclaiming the things they did in New York City.

The carousal spits out bags one at a time as travelers jostle into a mini-mob waiting to snatch a giant suitcase or golf bag the instant it rolls down the belt.

We're standing with the more patient people as Laurel and Cassidy argue over who's rolling the bag to the car.

Arms intertwined, Sarah and I are happy to be together again in the "suddenly compact universe of skin and breath and hair."

Cass grabs my UGA tee-shirt pleading because she just turned 7 she's perfectly capable of rolling the big bag by herself.

In the same instant, Laurel machine guns words, immediately overloading me with information which mostly seems aimed at Cassidy's inability to roll luggage without supervision.

Glancing up over her little blond head I spy Fran, staring stoically with folded arms, waiting on bags, standing beside us.

For the first time, I realize I've had two Fran's in my life.

I loved one of them.

She's dead.

"Hello Fran," I say to the other with the confidence of a Congressman telling another lie, "remember Sarah?"

Pauses really can be pregnant and this one was going to be volcanic when it blew!

"Micheal," she says without a smile, arms folded, a morticians face ... and then, "Of course, Sarah," with breath from Antarctica.

Sometimes history occurs in a second.

Sarah holds me tighter, grinning beatifically, and confidently says, "Of course. Fran!" with the slightest hint of "I don't give a shit!"

Fran had been a board member of the organization where we'd both worked. After 30 years in the business I begged for a sabbatical and the board said "No" so the weight of homelessness, AIDS, poverty, despair, really bad Government and hunger did me in.

Such graveyards are full of emotions.

Two large purple and white stripped bags roll passed on the belt and Fran jerks to grab them, as though a Zombie scratching the dirt off a grave and then she's instantly gone.

Cass tackles me ... "See! I can do this!"

And she does.

Well, it tips over four times before we get to the car, but dammit, she did it.

Unlike others I've known and choose to forget.
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