Theater of the Soul

I was pretty much born and raised a city girl for the first 15 years of my life. I grew up in the outskirts of Boston and would have probably been perfectly content to spend the rest of my life in the same atmosphere. After my father died when I was 13, I kind of fell in with the wrong crowd and started really messing up. Drinking and drugging commenced around that time, as well as a few run-ins with the law. I was quickly turning into a heathen and my mother had finally had enough of my shit, so she plucked me out of my comfort zone and moved me to East Bumfuck, Nowhere.

The first few weeks in the new school were HELL. As you can imagine, I was quite pissed off at the entire world and went out of my way to make sure that I didn’t fit in. I didn’t WANT to fit in…I just wanted to go HOME. I felt completely out of my element, which I’m sure was exactly what my mother intended. It worked. I fell in with a decent crowd of friends, including The Ex and my beloved Egomanic, and slowly began changing my ways.

Instead of raising hell at the Mall, my time was spent at the lake. Instead of prowling city streets, I was hiking and camping during the summer…snowmobiling and ice climbing in the winters. The guys had a band that they were trying to get off the ground, so my afterschool time was spent at an old barn, listening and laughing. They tried to teach me to play an instrument…ANY instrument…but I am a lost cause in that area and I soon learned I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket either.

The Ex (who was The Boyfriend at the time) taught me to drive an old 3 speed on the column pick up truck, always reminding me that although the fancy, new automatic Bronco my mom had was nice, I needed to know how to drive anything available in an emergency. I learned to fish and hunt, albeit with a camera rather than a gun. I simply couldn’t bring myself to kill anything, but I learned to shoot guns and rifles, as well as how to clean fish and field dress deer and bear. More than once I heard, “Oh will you STOP being such a pussy! Your hands are WASHABLE, you know” from those that proclaimed to love me.

One of the hardest things I learned was how to be quiet and not feel the need to fill every waking moment with noise. Some of the most memorable times in my life have taken place in silence, in a valley filled with lupins, surrounded by mountains and friends.

There is a defined line between the mountains where I live and the point where larger towns and cities prevail that the locals refer to as “The Notch”. There are few occasions where I willingly venture below that point, but when I do, I can’t wait to get back to the point where the mountains rise up on both sides of me to welcome me HOME.

While friends and I were moving furniture last week, I was quite excited to be able to take my dining room table and chairs out of storage and took a relatively new male friend of mine to the storage unit with me to retrieve it. The dining set is nothing special but is in new condition compared to the beat up table and chairs that he helped move the day before. When we returned with the dining set, my Egomaniac and my Clown were already here moving stuff for me and met us outside to help unload. While NewFriend and Ego carried the table upstairs and my Clown and I followed with chairs, NewFriend suggested that I ‘get rid of the crappy kitchen table and replace it with something newer’.

Ego and Clown’s jaws dropped. Outside, flocks of birds left in a mass exodus. Dogs and small children hid under beds and in closets. Silence descended over the land.

“Never” was all I could say at the time, but later, over beers at that beat up kitchen table, we explained to NewFriend the significance of that particular piece of furniture.

In March 1988, my mother died of lung cancer. I had temporarily quit high school to take care of her during the last year of her life and was 17 when she died. Clown, being about 6 years older than the rest of us, took me in afterwards so that I could return to school and graduate. My group of friends rallied around me and lent all the help I needed. I worked a part-time job, crammed a missed year of high school into three months and graduated on time the following June. Right after graduation, I found a full time job and set about getting my first apartment.

I found a cute studio apartment in the center of town. It wasn’t anything to write home about…just a kitchen and a livingroom/bedroom combo, but it was all MINE. I had absolutely no furniture except for my waterbed, so the guys all chipped in and bought me this massive kitchen table and chair set. It was a beautiful thing. The 6 chairs were fabric covered and on wheels. Yes, they went overboard a bit. I didn’t need anything that big in an apartment, but little did I know that my place would become THE place for us all to hang out.

Over the years, that table has been home to weekend-long Poker, Risk and Dungeons and Dragons games (yeah, we have a few geek-ish tendencies). When Ego and TheEx were in a band together, their best songs were written on that table and breakfasts were served over it every Sunday morning after driving all night to get home from one weekend gig or another. Love was found, fought for and lost over that table. Weddings have been planned on that table. Tears have been wiped away over that table. Friendships have been forged and solidified and truths have been spoken over that table. Dreams have been shared and lives planned over that table. Beer and blood have been spilled at that table. Mourning through the loss of several beloved friends has been done over that table. Children have been raised and boo-boos kissed over that table. A house burned down around that table. My most famous cooking mistakes have been served on that table. Laughter and camaraderie has been shared, problems worked out, birthdays and holidays have been celebrated on that table. Dragons and demons, both fictional and figurative, have been slain over that table.

The battle for one of our souls was fought over that table.

The chairs were lost when the house burned down and it has a ton of scratches and dings, but it is SO much more than just a crappy kitchen table.