Part Two

The title of this post refers to the fact that I never post two things in a single day. (At least I don't remember doing it before.) But, this evening tied in so strongly to what I just posted, that I think it called for an addendum.

Tonight, we went to say goodbye to a dear friend who is moving back home.

Sort of.

She just got her graduate degree here in the PNW and is headed back to the state where she's from. When she gets there, she needs to find a job, a church and a life.  In the meantime, she and her cat are moving back into her room,  in the home with the parents she hasn't lived with for five years.

Her parents are good people. People who have loaned her out to us, an ocean away, for five long years. But, I wonder if they know she's not the same girl who left.

She has a couple of job possibilities once she gets there.  Dad is lobbying heavily for her to pick Job A, because it's stable with a good income. She told him a few days ago, in no uncertain terms, that Job A was not going to work for her---that she might choose Jobs B or C and she was confident she could live on a lot less, thank you very much. 

And, so it goes.

My suspicion is, not only don't they realize she's not the same girl who left;   they've forgotten who they were when they were her age.

One of the first places I ever lived when I moved out from my parents house, was a little cottage on the shabby side of the university. There were three of us housemates. We lived next door to a halfway house.  One morning, my roommate woke up to find a drunk sleeping face down on our front lawn. Two questionable guys lived in the little cottage in our backyard. A year or two before, a student had committed suicide by jumping off the top of the campus parking garage across the street.

I thought it was a little piece of heaven.

Some of the best memories of my life were made in that house.  Two years later, the good times continued when our little family of housemates expanded to five, and we moved into a huge old Craftsman style house on an even shabbier side of the school. There was a rooming house on one side, and an apartment building on the other. The house backed up to some kind of a tire factory, I think.  We each paid $110 a month in rent and $15 a week in groceries. (Hard to fathom even as I write this.)  This time there was no parking garage, but we were a few houses away from a freeway overpass. No more problems with drunks.  Now it was hookers who were plying their trade two blocks over.  I used to work graveyard shift at one of my first jobs in radio.  I left the house all alone, in the pitch dark at 12:30 each morning and I never batted an eye.  Hey, I believed that God had put me there, and I felt safe.

My friend tells me tonight that she knows for a fact that her parents lived hand-to-mouth when they were first married.

"My mom told me that they used to pray before every purchase--every purchase!!" she shrieks.

Dad has been gifted for many years, with a stable and well-paying job.  But, when his girl moves home, I hope it stirs up his memory a little.  I hope it takes him back to those days when he didn't know what was around the next corner.  Back to those days when, difficult or not, I'm willing to bet he and his young bride were very, very happy.

Of course they prayed before every purchase.  We all did.  That's what you do when you set out on your own.

We just have a bad habit of forgetting who we were.