---Allen Saunders
Planning for spontaneity is a bit like waiting for the perfect opening line for an essay.
Frequently it happens by getting started with something else and then just eliminating the first couple of paragraphs, or in the case of travel, just getting started rather than waiting to be certain of the perfect place to start.
My gorgeous wife Julie always likes to have at least two trips planned. When we finish our current vacation, we always have at least one more on the drawing board, so when we went to our niece Kendra’s wedding in Cabo San Lucas in February we had a general plan to go back to Montana for a summer vacation with family, and the seed sprouted in Cabo.
Julie’s sister Cheryl said our nephew Jered could only get away from work to drive her there for the 4th of July weekend, and while that was earlier than we really wanted to go up to Big Sky, it would be do-able.
With that time frame in mind, Julie sent an e-mail to her Aunt Myrtle about visiting Myrt and her brother, Uncle George, in Turlock on our way northbound. Three months slipped by without reply, and Julie felt that perhaps we were being shunned for me being a knuckle-dragging troglodyte.
In the meantime, Julie’s brother John said his family of five would be joining us in Montana when Cheryl came. John's family actually cancelled due to health issues, but their initial commitment really solidified our estimated arrival date. We finalized plans with our daughter Gina, son-in-law Laszlo and granddaughter Emma, which was to have them come on one side or another of a conference Gina needed to attend with Columbia University, and my sister Darlene's family also committed to arrive earlier than they had originally planned in order to spend time with Gina's family.
Our nephew Jered was fortunate to land a new job but unfortunately it apparently would not allow him to travel over the 4th of July. With the plans basically in place, however, Cheryl decided to fly over from her Seattle area home by herself.
Unexpectedly in June, Julie received an email from Aunt Myrtle, who, it turns out, no longer used her AOL email address. Upon finding Julie's message, she replied that she would love to have us stop in to learn more about the family’s Scottish heritage (Julie’s Greek grandfather’s wife, who was Myrtle's mother) and that George would also love to see us. Julie set it up for us to drop by Uncle George’s house in Turlock around lunch time (but not for lunch due to his restricted diet) and then head up to Aunt Myrtle’s house in Rocklin. Otherwise, we would have taken the shorter route through Las Vegas.
Do you need a program to keep track of all this? That’s why sometimes it’s best to eliminate the first couple of paragraphs (or in this case, full page), but the foregoing explains why Julie and I found ourselves northbound early in the morning of June 29.
Because it was 104 degrees in Turlock, and Uncle George does not have central air like his wealthy sister Myrtle, at the last minute the plan was changed for Julie’s cousin Nikole and her husband LeRoy to pick up George and bring him to Myrtle’s house in Rocklin, so that became our initial destination.
On a totally unrelated front, I learned my cousin Bonny had made her transition to pure spirit three weeks prior, and on June 28, the Friday night before we left home, her brother Mark had sent me a facebook message about accessing a slide show video he planned to show at her memorial in Northern California.
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| Painting by Lindberg Heilige Schutzengel |
"Actually, I think it is pretty close to Rocklin."
"That’s where the memorial service is for Bonny."
"I think we need to go."
It was about lunch time when we saw the freeway off ramp for Riverside Avenue in Roseville, so we stopped at a Subway there. On my smartphone, I searched for Bonny’s funeral and found the notice for a memorial at Calvary Chapel on Riverside Drive at 6:30 PM, which was no more than a couple hundred yards from where we sat eating lunch. This meant we could go to Aunt Myrtle’s house at the appointed time to spend about 4 ½ hours, which incidentally turned out to be about the perfect length visit for exploring old photos and documents of family history.
This essay, however, is not so much about what we did as how we got there.
Think about the level of coincidence -- the cacophony of unrelated events -- that had to unfold for our plan to lead us to my cousin’s memorial service 420 miles from home.
In that happenstance, I see my mother winking at us with her warm smile once again. She would have been there herself in body if that were still physically possible, and she would have wanted Julie and me there in her stead.
In Mark's slide show presentation from different phases of Bonny's life, my mother’s image showed up frequently along side that of Bonny, which is not surprising, because they loved and respected each other very much. In addition, I was somewhat taken aback to see in the photos how much Bonny as a child resembled both daughter Gina and granddaughter Emma, God's reminder that life on earth carries on after we pass.
I should note that I very rarely have attended funerals or memorial services, something for which my mother often chided me. I always said we should pay our respects to people while they are alive rather than after they pass away.
At the service I felt compelled to give testimony to the fact that I knew Bonny well before most of the people at the service, who generally knew her only after her health had deteriorated. I knew Bonny from the time when she was a sweet, optimistic child, to when she was a strong, independent adult.
Perhaps it was because I had not attended the funeral of my Uncle Bob, Bonny’s father, that my comments drifted toward him, and I became somewhat lost in my thoughts, not unlike this article where I veer from side to side, and I felt I had gone on too long, so I handed the microphone to the next volunteer before I mentioned her Pontiac Firebird dream car, which to some extent epitomized her focus and success as a goal-oriented young woman. I remember when she told me she wanted that Firebird, and I said something about advertisements for new Firebirds. She said she didn’t like the new body style nearly as much as the one she wanted (basically the original Smokey and the Bandit without the Trans Am stickers). After saving for months, her eyes sparkled when she showed me she had accomplished her goal. Her dad had always been a car guy, driving a classic Ranchero for many years that tempted others to make offers to buy it when he’d pull into the swap meet parking lot, and that motorhead element obviously carried on with Bonny.
She eventually became a motorcycle enthusiast, like her brother Mark, who unlike me stayed close to her until the end, and it became an additional binding tie for them. Mark had been up visiting her to help repair her bike, which had been damaged by a friend, when he brought her to that very Calvary Chapel in Roseville. She told Mark that initially she really did not want to go to church, but once there, she found friendship and comfort.
While the memorial service this day was indeed quite comforting, I had taken some offense to her minister’s musings that Bonny had only been happy after re-committing herself to God a couple of years ago, after she was sick, and perhaps that is why I felt I needed to share my memories of her being happy as a young person, but I also recognize that we all find many roads that take us temporarily astray. As evidenced by the way Julie and I came to be at this service, what may seem like detours may take us exactly where we need to go, and however Bonny arrived at this loving support group, one thing very clear at the service was how much Bonny was loved by many near the end of her life. All of them talked of her bright smile and kind words in the face of an inevitable fate.
The minister’s words frequently reflected the tone of my mother’s memorial five years earlier to celebrate the life, and the song selected for the video presentation, Tears in Heaven, was one we had requested the keyboardist play at Mom's service, but which she didn’t know, and we didn't make a plan to include it some other way.
The minister quoted from Psalms, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil,” which is a verse from what was my sister’s favorite Biblical passage as a child that begins, “The Lord is my shepherd..." Darlene had repeated it over and over as she memorized it for Sunday School when we were children, so I inadvertently learned it too. And I always have believed it to the point where it is engrained in my soul.
There was a picture at our church in Seal Beach, the same church where we held my mother's memorial, of a little boy being led by his big sister as they cross a bridge, with a guardian angel watching over them. That’s how my whole life has felt; the world is always in divine order, and at the risk of offending agnostics and atheists, anyone who does not know this feeling has never truly been alive. That guardian angel for me now takes on the countenance of Mom, and she brought Julie and me to this service, for which I am quite grateful.
While I'm no angel, I'd be happy to help guide you to your next vacation. Who knows what will happen once you're busy making other plans?
