So, I was in Nashville (Brentwood, actually) Saturday at a book event for A Second Blooming at Barnes and Noble, with local authors/contributors River Jordan and Kathy Rhodes. We had a good turnout, a great time, and then on Monday A Second Blooming contributor Wendy Reed posted this story on Facebook:
A friend from high school—whom I wish I saw more—texted me: “I have a story for you.”
The last time I saw her was Christmas before last. She’d completed chemo; I was facing an essay deadline. She drank water and listened. I drank a beer and complained. Though I didn’t use her name, I wound up writing that scene into my essay and so sent it to her to make sure I, who don’t perceive straight lines, hadn’t crossed one. True to her generous and kind nature, she thought it was fine.
Her text had piqued my interest, so I immediately dialed her number, and after catching up—she is doing well, feeling strong, and still upbeat and grateful, while I am cursing another deadline—the story she wanted to tell me was about Mother’s Day. In addition to graduating from the same high school, she and I have lost and become mothers, and enjoy reading books, which is what her husband and son went to Barnes and Noble to buy her for Mother’s Day, which good soul that she is, she spent driving to her father’s in Birmingham to go to a jazz concert with him. I think her husband and son had planned to buy her CS Lewis, but in the front of the store two women were signing a book, A SECOND BLOOMING.
“It’s about strong women by strong women,” the women said. Strong women: 1; CS Lewis 0 (okay, not the total all-time sales score, but just wait.) My friend thanked them for her present, vowed to read it when she returned, and headed to her father’s . It had been a year and a half since I’d sent her the essay, but somewhere outside of Nashville a little bell went off.
“Honey,” she said when her husband answered the phone (Actually I’m pretty sure she doesn’t call her husband “honey,” but I am pretty sure she pulls off the road to make calls), “Will you open the book and see if my friend’s listed as one of the authors?”
He found my name.
“I might be in there,” she said, directing him to turn to the last part of the essay. “I was originally, but it might have gotten cut.”
I wanted to tell her how essential she had been to the story, but I was too stunned. Her husband, whom I’ve only met once and who had no idea about the essay, wandered into a store with thousands of other books and walked out with the one book that not only has an essay by his wife’s old friend but also inspired in part by his wife. Is it just me, or is the Twilight Zone theme playing? Some use the word ‘coincidence.’ Others invoke the divine. I call such synchronicity. My grandmother called them signs.
My essay “Woman on a Half Shell” does not trade on faith, hope or coincidences, but it does meander aimlessly, and way more than I’d intended (I dream of writing tight, well-structure prose someday), but maybe, just maybe, there’s something to unstructured winding, to going forward anyway, to losing sight of our destination, to enjoying being lost so that we may find surprise. (Or maybe it’s my idealism showing again.) But I do know that I am delighted to have met Marcella Brehmer Tudeen so many years ago, to hear that her story is going so well, and I especially enjoy the part of her story where she unwraps A SECOND BLOOMING, a gift, and quite the surprise.
I remember the man and his son who purchased the book from us at the bookstore on Saturday. If you have a copy of A Second Blooming: Becoming the Women We Are Meant to Be, look at page 150, where two paragraphs in Wendy’s essay, “Woman On a Half Shell,” are about this man’s wife! How’s that for synchronicity?
And that Wendy can sure tell a good story.
So can the other 19 women who contributed essays to the collection, so if you haven’t read it yet, BUY IT NOW and dive in!