One of my favorite places is Charleston, South Carolina. It's magical -- history plus the beach. What could be better? There's a whole town of gorgeous Victorian homes, crowded together like jewels on a necklace. Ken and I have visited several times and simply love it. When Liz wanted to do something special for her 26th birthday, she and I wound up planning a trip. Speaking of trips....
Liz likes baseball, so we bought a rasher of tickets to three of the minor league games by the river. We thought, wow, Tim Tebow's going to be playing that weekend. Liz can bring her lasso. They traded him before we could get there. Poor guy doesn't know what he's missing. Either way, we were running late to that first night's game. We had front row tickets and were hoofing it in the gate to find our seats. There was an unfortunate piece of bleached wood jutting out into the aisle we were running down. Yaya didn't see it and hit the concrete like a slab of steak on a grill. Every joint in my body screamed out to the heavens as I lay there, pondering life and how I was going to gracefully get up. I can't get up nicely on a good day, with no one watching. There were about a hundred eyes on me, with eight to ten people in my periphery just waiting to help. I was offered ice, water, hands. My back, wrists, and waist were wrenched out of their usual places. I believed with all my soul that one of my ribs had punctured a lung and I was going to bleed out any minute. My right foot was scraped underneath and the middle toe swelled up like a mushroom. All I wanted to do was curl up and die. Eventually I pulled myself up and tried to disappear into the crowd.
That wasn't the worst of it. All weekend, every move was torture. With our full agenda planned and paid for, there wasn't getting out of any fun. There was a carriage ride around town, a plantation jaunt with no actual plantation but miles of gardens and strange birds stalking me, a mansion tour, shopping, two more baseball games, the downtown market and obligatory ice cream stop. Worst of all was when I decided to change out my sneakers for sandals, since it was 150 degrees in the heat...I peeled off my socks and wisely stepped onto pavement that was hot enough to fry shrimp. So now I had filleted, toasted AND grilled toes. My feet always look rather like Hobbit feet, but now they looked like brats straight off the barbie. Liz had no sympathy for me at all. I think she believes I'm a hypochondriac, even when I had all the evidence right there with my sausage toes and black bits of asphalt ground into the pads of my feet.
We actually had a marvelous time. Liz got lots of attention from the cute pitchers warming up in front of our seats. We saw beautiful architecture and heard new history lessons. We ended up at our former pastor's church on Sunday and then had a delightful lunch at their home. The brief touching of our lives was a bit of heaven on earth. Looking back on the weekend, it was a picture of life. Rush. Fall down. Get up. Get there. Sit. Participate. Pain. Fix the pain. Clean up. Sleep. We keep repeating those cycles, if you think about it. On our drive back Sunday night, my right shoulder decided to start screaming. I guess it was a good thing, since we left really late and drove through the pounding rain like madmen to get home. The pain kept me from getting sleepy. As my dear daughter snoozed in oblivion next to me, I turned off the radio. Without my phone or computer or humanoids to distract me, I talked to God about a whole lot of stuff. Heaven and hell always seem to ride real close together. Precious times.
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