Just a small town girl…

I’ve started this blog and erased it three times now. I can’t seem to be brief enough – this is a long story, and I can’t imagine you sticking with me if I tell it all. So let me see what I *need* to bare.

First, I was going to go to Starkville next weekend to see some of my bffs from MSU and LHS. I knew I couldn’t go now, but didn’t know how I was going to break it to the people who expected me to come. Only two people were in my heart and mind as I prepared my excuses and one of them, Mark, called me this weekend to apologize profusely that he just could not make the drive from Austin. Perfect, one down. Now, for Marie.

I could have said that I couldn’t afford the gas, or that Wet and Wild was going on at the Zoo this weekend and I really wanted to go. I could have insisted that I was expected to teach Religious Ed this Sunday at church. All of these things are true. But that’s not why I can’t go.

I can’t go because I feel like I can’t possibly ask my husband to trust me enough to let me go down there alone and drink next weekend. Not right now. And I would love to hide this part of my personal life, but after ranting and wailing about Jeremy’s transgressions on myspace, how can I omit my own and thus lie to you all and give you a skewed vision of my marriage, of my life?

I cheated on my husband this summer. Not physically, but mentally, emotionally, verbally. It is really hard to admit that to you because I don’t consider myself that kind of person. Most of you know via my myspace blogs what all happened back in April, and how I was just at a very vulnerable point in my marriage. Had I not had children, I would have left him then. But instead I started to go out more often, drink more. When an old high school friend emailed me, a safe opportunity presented itself. After all, this guy lives nearly a world away, so it’s not like the guys at the bar, it’s not really real, right? It’s harmless, it’s fun, it’s not serious and it’s not cheating. But that’s bullshit, it’s not harmless, it’s hurtful… I would be so hurt if it had been done to me.

After all that’s gone on, Jeremy and I were finally able to talk. We talked a lot about the vicious cycle we’ve been in – one of us hurts the other, we feel justified in hurting each other back, and round and round we go… We have now decided to forgive and move forward and see if we can possibly get on with our lives and stop hurting each other just for some sort of revenge that does nothing but backfire.

We went to Louisville this weekend. We dropped the kids off at my parents and rode around the town, seeing if anything had changed since our last visit (it’s been a loooong time). Not much has. We got to see an old friend that night, Todd, who Jeremy and I agree is our coolest mutual friend. Todd and I didn’t become friends until EC, but we went to high school together. While we were out (at Old Venice, missing YOU, Marie) we discussed high school, the people we knew, and the Where They Are Now stories.

I have a confession. I’ve been jealous of people like Marie, who have friends they’ve known since childhood, who keep up with people they graduated with, who enjoy going home. And I’ve thought that I am a misfit in my old school, with my old friends; that I am an outcast in my own hometown and that I am unloved and unwanted. I’ve had visions of my empty funeral, of childhood friends who say, “Good riddance.”

But sitting outside the bar that night, Todd says to the group, “the only person from Louisville High School that I care about seeing is sitting right there,” and pointed to me.

And I thought about that. It was a pretty big compliment considering he’s hands down my favorite person I graduated with, but that’s not what I pondered on – not only is he on my very short list of People From Louisville I Care Anything About, but I also thought about who else might have Todd on their list. Probably not many people in Louisville give a shit more about him than they do about me. But I think he’s one of the coolest human beings on the planet. So does it lessen who he is as a person, that Louisville doesn’t care about him? FUCK NO. So why do I hold myself to a different standard?

I promised him I’d text him as soon as we made it home safely, and nearly 60 hours later I remembered to do that. The ride home from Starkville took a little longer that night, though, because Jeremy and I detoured through the Refuge and made love on the Overlook for hours while a storm rolled in. The thunder, the lightning, the wind and being naked in raw nature… it was the most perfect night of my life so far. And I knew after that that we were going to make it.

On the way back to my parents’ I told him to stop the car. See, there is another person on my List of Louisvillians, but he died a couple years ago. I’ve never stopped missing him, and I’ve never been open and honest about our relationship. I kinda hid it from most of my friends, afraid they would think I was weird or that telling them about this man would cheapen what we had together.

Since childhood, I have walked across my street to visit an old gentleman across the road. His name was George, and he’d fix me something to drink and let me look at his pictures while he talked. I’d especially admire the one of him and John F. Kennedy on the wall, a token of his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. A retired journalist and Harley Davidson enthusiast, I used to revel in his use of profanity, used to soak up his rants about the “lying motherfuckers” at the Clarion Ledger, or just rednecks in general. I have never cried harder than I did as I sat in that old Universalist church during his funeral. His wife reminisced with me some after that, reminding me of the day George ran out of gas on his Harley and I stopped, as I often did for stranded motorists on my road, to help. She said, “George said you’ve always been a pretty girl, but you were never more beautiful than you were that day,” and I cried into her shoulder. I never told her how George talked about them, their love story, of how they met at East Central, the same way I met my husband. I never told her how candidly he talked to me about their sex life, about how he used to worry that she wasn’t really sexually attracted to him but yet stayed with him because they were just “so damned compatible!”

I never told anyone much about George, but as we passed by his house I knew this was the perfect place, the exact place I wanted to leave my mark on Louisville. I told Jeremy to pull over and there at 4 am with George’s old house as my backdrop, I left something I hope will inspire at least one kid from Betheden. It was my gift to Jeremy, to our marriage, to George, to Todd, to Amanda, to every other kid who hates their hometown or who desperately wants to start fresh and be forgiven. Sins washed clean! I give you the stop sign in front of George’s house, the one connecting my road to Amanda’s:

As I drove away from Louisville yesterday, for the first time in my LIFE, I got teary-eyed. I thought of George, too, and what it was that I always loved about him. It was his raw honesty I think. No matter who he was around, George would look like a little wrinkled old man but he’d open his mouth and say, “Goddamnit, this is boring.” I just loved it. And I thought, “If only everyone could be that honest, that real,” and immediately, like it was the voice of God herself, Gandhi’s words popped into my head: You have to be the change you wish to see in the world.

I hope this blog is a good start to me being that change.

Thanks for reading all of it.