Ah life and its turns ....
by "Street", Houston, Texas. November 4, 2006
2 different thoughts today.
1. The Randomness that is Life. Do you remember the part in Titanic where Jack ends up at the first class table with the rich and powerful and says that the night before he was sleeping under a bridge and now he was eating with the "finest" people? I have just expereinced such a turn. Last night, through no skill or effort of my own other than to be open to the wonder that is life, I ended up having dinner with Nadia Comaneci and Bart Conner, gymnastics' royal family. The entire night was a veritable Who's Who of international gymnastics, as the entire industry celebrated the soon-to-be wedding of Dominique Moceanu. And there I was, in the middle of it, sort of hanging out while the darlings of the summer Olympics talked about growing up and moving on. Even if you never liked the sport (which I always did), you couldn't help but be impressed with the presence, strength, and character of these adults who were thrust into center stage when they were children and performed athletic feats far beyond the measure of all the rest of us and upon whose shoulders the hopes of literal nations rode.
2. Closure on old crushes. When I was little, in 6th grade or so, I had two crushes: one on a girl named Tessa and the other on a celebrity named Nadia. Earlier this week, by chance, I happened to learn that Tessa (who was always the smartest girl in school) had become an Ivy-league educated doctor and had moved out west to doubtless save all of us from illnesses we didn't yet know we had. So there was closure. And then, last night, at the rehersal dinner of the century, I end up sitting at a table, eating dinner with my first celebrity crush, Nadia Comaneci. And, somewhat uniquely, I was one of the group of people there who remembered Nadia and the impact she had across the country in real time; that is, I was a live witness to her brillence in Montreal via ABC and Jim McKay, and I remember the response to the enigmatic 14 year old with the endearing smile and big brown eyes.
Nadia is older now, she's 44, and she has a 5 month old, Dylan, with her husband, Bart Conner. And she, like so many eastern European woman, has a sternness, a stately bearing, but a coldness that comes with time and experience and effort. I admit, though I could see in her many of the great qualities it takes to be her, to have done what she did, to have accomplished so much, I couldn't see the gentle innocence and warmth we all remember in that 14 year old girl who scored the first 10.00 in Olympic history, when the machine didn't have enough digits, and was thus read "1.00". But sitting with her and talking with her about her young son was certainly a joy. And so I closed the book on that crush as well.
Who would ever have thought that such opportunities would be afforded me this week, this month, this year, or ever? It reminds me that life has so much to give us, so much we don't control, but yet we can benefit from, if we just take our own hands off the reins. Life does go by so fast. If you don't look up, you really just might miss it. And then, then, what stories will you tell your children?
