PRICELESS GOLD YOU CAN’T BUY

Priceless gold nuggets from a 50th high school reunion?

I had it checked out.

They looked at the front, the back, turned it over.

“How much,” I asked?

Gold this good isn’t laying around some creek or in some cave.

It comes from the Salmon Room on a Saturday night.

A golden room with a touch of silver. Maybe more than a touch.

But the gold was there, priceless gold.

That’s what you find when good people are determined to bring others together.

It’s a golden time for those who show up, and for those who don’t.

A date every year, or every ten years, feels like it was yesterday.

Ten years from now, or a year, will feel the same.

What’s that feeling?

Familiar Faces and Places

From airports and train stations, to just walking down the street, you see familiar faces.

Maybe it happens to you, too? You see someone and think, ‘they look just like someone I know.’

Then you drive around town looking at the changes: “Didn’t that used to be the skating rink?”

On Saturday night the faces were more than familiar.

But just in case, we all wore a lanyard with our graduation pictures.

Some people haven’t changed. Haven’t changed for the better? No, they were good from the start.

I felt like I gained about ten pounds of extra girth just thinking about losing weight for the big night.

No weight loss, no man-spanx, hair dye, or tooth whitener.

Just priceless gold.

***

My drive down with my wife included the backstreets, beginning with the early right turn in Drain that skirts downtown and exits on Hwy 38 behind the burger place.

“How did you know where to turn, honey,” she asks?

“They don’t call me the Great Navigator for nothing.”

“Who calls you the Great Navigator?”

“You could. I didn’t get lost in Drain.”

“That makes the backroad the Strait of Gillaspie?”

“It is for us, cartographer. Map it.”

I thought of that while we drove back from Sunset Beach on Cape Arago Highway.

If I took the correct street out of Empire I could come down on 16th to Broadway.

But since I whiffed on naming the two bars that used to stand at the sharp right turn for town I stayed on the main road.

Besides, I’d already gotten lost driving around the bay and passing the Mel Counts Corridor five times.

Not a good look for the Great Navigator.

Listening To Priceless Gold

When you grow up on the coast your learn early about sea shells; you can hear the ocean when you put one up to your ear.

I did the same thing with my priceless gold when I got home.

What did I hear? 1973.

Fifty years of living goes by fast, just ask anyone at a reunion.

But it has its slow-time, too. Especially when you’re fighting for your life against one of the scourges of the day.

Like cancer, for instance.

Priceless Gold says you may feel like you’ll never get back to who you are, who you used to be.

You’ll have to adapt to a ‘new normal.’

Why not plan on the new normal being an improved version of the old normal?

This is a big ask of yourself because cancer therapy is more than enough to deal with.

But you need to plan for the future. You still need plans.

Plan on being sassy enough to walk away from the dread and the comfort of treatment.

Get yourself fixed up, follow the doctor’s instructions, and stay on schedule.

Eventually the light shines brighter and you warm up to the living and love you’ve got in front of you.

You come back from the other side with a joy you never expected.

Give yourself that grace and pass it along to whoever might need it.

Coming from you will make all the difference.