So here�s the incredibly stupid thing I did last week. I wrote two big checks on the wrong checking account (that is, the one without all the money in it.) I realized it the next day, and dashed off to the bank first thing in the morning and deposited the money, writing a check from the right account (the one with the money) and depositing it. So I was covered. Two days later I went to the ATM but it wouldn�t give me any cash because the account was overdrawn. Hmm. Checked that deposit slip again, and it turned out this time I had grabbed the wrong deposit slips (instead of grabbing the wrong checks, which is what started the whole thing) and I had deposited mass amounts of moolah into K�s account by mistake. So if she checked her balance that morning, it would have been like drawing the good Monopoly card: �Bank Error in Your Favor!� I emailed her and told her not to spend anything. Anyway, I wasn�t worried, because I knew I could go to the bank and Maria would straighten it all out for me.Now I don�t exactly live in a small town. It�s your basic fairly large suburb, with a population of about 30,000, so it�s not like I know everyone I meet, or like everyone at the bank will know me on sight and trust me. But I know Maria, because her daughter is the same age as R, and I used to be their Girl Scout leader. Link.
So Maria took care of everything this morning, and I asked about her daughter, and then I asked about her sons, because I had known them both when they were at the high school where I work. Link.
I guess I do know an awful lot of people in this town, or else I connect to them somehow, because I�ve lived or worked here since 1961, and my mother-in-law moved here in 1938 and my father-in-law was prominent in town. And I�ve worked at the same damn high school for 26 years, and I was a Girl Scout leader for about 11 years, and was the town leader at one point, and one of my troops had about 45 girls in it. So quiet little shy me just knows a whole lot of folks here. But that�s not what I wanted to talk about.
I was on my way out somewhere before, and I passed the bank (where Maria works) and I was thinking about how we come to link randomly to people in our lives and in the world, and I have to say how tickled I was to see a link to me in melwadel�s diary, and how it is that here in diary-land we link to each other, and not just weblinks, but links in a more tangible way. It started out randomly � I don�t even remember how I found most of the diaries I read � but it�s as real as the people we sometimes randomly link to in life.
So I�m driving along, and Girl Scout thoughts are bouncing around in there somewhere, and another random and brief, yet somehow significant, memory came back to me. I was driving past a county park that we have here in town, and I remembered a picnic the troop had there once at the end of the year. We had to get a permit to have a group picnic in the park, and after working out the date with my co-leader, I called the County Parks office to find out how to get the permit. The guy on the other end of the phone seemed busy and a little bored, and when I told him the date we wanted, he said that he couldn�t possibly issue a permit in time for us to use the park on that date. We would have to pick another date. He wasn�t too interested in expediting things, I could tell.
So I told him the truth, which was that one of the girls in the troop, the co-leader�s daughter, in fact, was being treated for cancer, and we had scheduled our picnic around her current chemotherapy cycle. We would never get a date far enough in advance to meet the county�s agenda, since she had to finish a round before they scheduled the next one, depending on how well she tolerated it.
There was a pause. A long pause. And then he asked where she was being treated, and how she was doing. I told him. Even though she had a rare cancer, one that had never before been diagnosed in a child, she was holding her own during treatment. Although she had been in treatment for a year already, there was still no definite prognosis. He listened. Then he told me that his daughter was undergoing chemotherapy at the same hospital, and it was too soon to tell for her, too. He issued the permit for our picnic the next day. Link.
And then there are broken links, but the good kind. Like most of the other girls who were in that troop, my little Scout is graduating from college this May. By the time she got to the high school she was cancer-free and even had all her hair grown back. She went to college as a dance major. And like all the other girls in the troop except for my own R and her best friend, I haven�t seen her in years. Girl Scouts grow up and grow away, and what a good thing that is.
But they�re all still rolling around in me somewhere. Link. Link.
