Weekend Coffee Share 5/21/16

If we were having a morning beverage (aka coffee)…

So Pitiful

I’d first have to tell you about our little pup.  Doesn’t he look pitiful?  We found him laying in the middle of a lane on a busy road, curled up as tight as a ball.  I thought he was dead and then his head popped up.  I turned around and picked him up.  He was scared to death.  He came to our home after we ran him by the Humane Society to check for a chip and he became ours.

We just got him neutered and he now his “cone of shame” is almost as big as him.  We have to hand feed him because he can’t reach any of the bowls.  When he tries to go up the stairs, he makes it up one or two stairs, hits the edge of the cone and it knocks him back to the bottom.  He will walk up to a chair and the cone goes flat against the base…and he just stands there like that.  You have to laugh because it’s so pitiful.

Bounce

If we were having a morning beverage…

I’d have to tell you about my 17-year-old son who, when I asked him yesterday how his day was,  as I usually do (How was your day?  Anything interesting? Fun? Bad? Learn anything?) and he answers no.  Then today, when I’m taking him to a friend’s house, we see a bouncy house and I ask him if he wants to go bounce in it.   He casually tells me he bounced in one yesterday!  I looked at him so quickly and said, “And when I asked you if you had anything happen yesterday you said nothing?”  He laughs and says he forgot!  Geez!  He goes on to tell me it was part of senior prank week and that other days they’d put balloons all over the halls so people had to walk through them and they Saran Wrapped the desks in one of the teacher’s rooms.  He evidently forgot on those days as well!

If we were having a morning beverage…

Hold Onto the Music

The most important thing I would have to tell you was that when I was on my trip to and from my friend’s graduation, I found my intense connection with music again.  After the one I loved died, I couldn’t sing for five years.  The sadness was just overwhelming.

I always LOVED music, but the one I loved ridiculed me for enjoying it and made me feel like I was wasting my memory learning “the stupid lyrics to all those songs instead of putting something of importance into my brain”.   I told him that my brain could do both whether he could believe it or not!

I held on to my music with everything in me through my life.  It has always been a part of the essence of who I am.  God speaks to me through it and a song can make my heart sing.  It was one place I could go, at any point of any day (even if it was only in my head) where I could escape into something beautiful, fun, promising or full of hope no matter what others were speaking into my life.

But after the one I loved died, I couldn’t sing anymore.  It was like even that part of me died.  I still listened to music, but it became less and less as I listened to audiobooks more and more.  Music still meant so much to me, but I couldn’t connect with it unless it was a really moving song or a song about making it past the barriers in life.  I was drawn to those songs (“Let Me Be Myself”, “Fight Song”, “Brave”, etc.) because they gave voice to the person that was slowly dying inside of me.

After five years, I knew if I didn’t start singing again, I never would.  So I started again, but it wasn’t the same.  The joy that used to overwhelm me when I heard a song I loved didn’t return.  I felt so hollow and I worried it would never be the same.  But, when I was on my way to the graduation, as I listened to music for two hours and was singing to it, something broke free and I felt the joy that had been so elusive since he died.  It was pure joy!  The gift of music was given back to me and I will be eternally thankful.  It’s like I gained part of my soul back.

Well, that was a deep story.  Enough about me.  What’s been going on in your life?

~ Joanna Lynn

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