Grateful

Once, I sat on the roof of an absolutely disgusting six-story hostel in the middle of the pocked, crumbling maze of antiquity that is Istanbul and looked out over the rooftops and minaret spires and lights. Beside me in a circle of students and travelers and wanderers, sat a Danish boy named Soren. That "O" has a weird line through it and it makes a vowel sound that my brain does not recognize. He laughed at me, drunk and giddy on beer and height, as he tried to shape my unwilling tongue around the sound. Around us, that filthy ancient city twinkled and sprawled and managed to look both exotic and beautiful.

Once, I leaped, brave beyond reason from adventure and youth, from stone steps carved into a cliff on the side of the island of Capri into the churning, crashing waves of the Mediterranean Sea and swam fighting the push-me-pull-me swells through a narrow cave entrance. There, I tread water with four or five other ignorantly-brave kids and watched the microorganisms that live in that dark space sparkle and blaze in neon and diamond, jewels beyond counting.

Once, I galloped on an agile, sure-footed stallion named Kirhan, across the rock-strewn high plains of the Atlas Mountains. I laughed, laughed out loud in blind joy, at the rocks and my bare head and the risk and the world and danger and fate, at falls and concussions and medical evacuations by helicopter. I laughed and I gambled without counting the costs of loss and I won.

Once, I clung to the back of a rusty truck, on a mountain of rice, baked and windswept and thirsty, and listened to Haitian teenagers scream songs to Jesus all the way up a dry, littered riverbed into the heart of starvation's furious maw. My heart pounded and my dry throat went drier at the sight of hundreds of people sitting in two painfully long lines. I moved down the left hand line at a speed that left no room for breathing, shoving bag after bag of rice from a wagon, into the hands of another volunteer, who threw it into hungry lap after hungry lap. A whistle blew when the rice ran out and we dropped everything, sacks, makeshift wagons, dignity and pride and ran back to the already moving truck, where hands waited to pull us up, out of harm's way, away from the tide of frustration that occasionally became a riot.

Once, I slipped, in a bikini and a snorkel, into the still, green waters of Palau's lagoon and watched, in frightened delight as two silver and steel dolphins swam quiet circles around me. Dive down, their keeper called, they like to play. I sank down towards the warped mirage of the bottom sand and the larger one, the male, sank with me, face to face. He nodded and smiled and clicked his encouragement and I reached out in wonder, thinking I am the lesser creature here. We surfaced together, him beside me, and the keeper called, grab him, he's offering, but I only vaguely heard because the female was on my other side, her soft-but-steel gray muscles against my body, and they took me for a short ride together. A gift.

Once, I quivered, doubled over with misery and terror, on a train stopped in no-man's-land between Romania and Bulgaria. My passport was gone, stolen by the friendly girls who had shared our compartment, and I understood, briefly, facing the machine-gun-armed teenagers on the station platform, what it meant not to be a citizen of a powerful, first-world country in this enormous world.

More than once, I have wept at sights too awe-inspiring for words, experiences too intense to explain.

I would trade it all, every moment, every memory, every single bit of it for my right now. My family. Matt. My children. My friends, near and far. That's how grateful I am. I am equally grateful that I don't have to bargain.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all. May your cup overflow.

If you aren't too busy cooking, tell me a memory you treasure from your time before children.

E&E Tally: 17735 words (holidays don't count, right?)
Blog posts: 25/30