The Aerie
Okay, so a few days ago Classmates sends me its regular spam that I
have however-many new classmates. I run out there, and lo and behold I
actually see someone to whom I wish to speak. Stacy was a year younger
than me, and a girl (at the time) with a sense of what was right for
her, and what she wanted, which I always admired.
[P2270007.jpg] I had actually been closer to her older sister,
Christa, who was a junior when I was a freshman. Christa was extremely
kind to me, treating a callow freshman as an equal, and introducing me
to some of the social customs of high school. "You don't get invited
to parties, you just go," she told me one time. I was a dorky kid who
had only moved to Minnesota the year before, while she was an
attractive junior, but the reasons for her superior social status
weren't yet clear to me.
Anyway, the next party that she heard about, she invited me to come
along, and I discovered that, in St. Francis, "party" didn't mean what
I thought. I always thought of a "party" as an indoor affair, with
music, food, dancing, and whatnot. Instead I stood freezing in a field
in the October gloom, listening to the radio through the open windows
of a pickup truck (this was before the invention of the boombox). A
crowd of strange upperclassmen jostled for position around a large
bonfire, driking 3/2 beer and trying to balance cold, flame, beer, and
smoke while thinking of something clever to say to each other.
[P2270009.JPG] Next year Christa graduated and Stacy was a freshman.
We were involved in the theater crowd at school and worked a lot of
stage crew together.
Twenty-five years later I e-mail her a hello and I learn that since
last we spoke she's become a glassblower -- one of the few female
glassblowers in Minnesota (yes, I'm sure she's heard all the jokes).
And it just so happens that she has a show opening Thursday
(yesterday) at the College of St. Thomas just across the river from my
home.
So before my weekly roleplaying game, I grabbed my digital camera,and
headed off to see what kind of glassblower, and what kind of woman,
Stacy had turned out to be.
[P2270016.JPG] The show was very small, just a gathering with wine and
cheese and a guitarist around a pair of cases showing a few items of
glass in one, and pottery in another. I quickly spotted Stacy, who was
much as I recalled her except with gray hair, and she hugged me in
greeting.
But Stacy was balancing 25 years of catch-up with the duties of being
the cause celebre, so she eventually introduced me to her oldest
syster, Dana. We chatted about Stacy for a few moments, and then I
asked.
"So how is your middle sister, Christa?"
[P2270022.JPG] "Oh,", Dana said, "She died last week. Breast cancer."
"WHAT!?" I cried. It hit me like a bat to the forehead. Not again!
Only last year I broke down and JOINED Classmates.com because I
[1]couldn't locate Maria from fourth grade, only to learn she'd died a
month before of a brain aneurysm. Not again!
But unfortunately, it was so.
Stacy later confessed that Christa had died shortly before Stacy
joined classmates.com, but she hadn't wanted to tell me about her
sister via e-mail after reading about my father and about Moldy on
here.
"I don't want to, like, offend you by saying this," she said, "but
I've always thought of you as a, um, a FEELING kind of guy. I don't
want to use the term 'sensitive male'."
I accepted her categorization as a compliment. And I agreed with her
that e-mail is not the best way to communicate this kind of news.
[P2270026.JPG]
Well, I stayed till the end of the show (about half an hour), met her
husband and some friends, agreed to get together sometime, etc. I left
the show and went off to my weekly game feeling wholly drained of
energy.
"What the fuck is with the cancer?" I wondered. I stopped at a store
to get a snack, and there was an old lady in the aisle. "How do you do
it?" I wanted to ask her, "How do you survive watching your friends
die as you age?" I didn't though.
[P2270027.JPG] As I was walking up the drive to my game I finally
grasped a phrase from [2]The Flaming Lips' "Do You Realize?" The
longer I live, the chances increase to 100% that everyone I know will
die. I couldn't stand it anymore, and as a jet roared in overhead I
stood in the dark on his long driveway and yelled incoherently at the
top of my lungs in anger and frustration.
I will never see Christa again. This absolutely sucks. Or Dr. J. Or my
father. Or Mr. Rogers.
I hate cancer. I fucking hate fucking fucking cancer.
[3]Last
Posted by Albatross at February 28, 2003 12:00 AM