Read the Goober Diary Archives

August 16, 2005: This is Here, This is Now

Sunday was a perfect rollercoaster, from start to finish. It ended with a phenomenal show at The Park Tavern (pictures are here), playing music with some of my favorite people, for some of my favorite people, and then eating and drinking for free.

The best part of the Park Tavern show was the surprise at the end; my guitar player, Dolph, and the lovely Miss Kara are now officially engaged! The proposal was the stuff of which young girls' dreams are made; he wrote a song especially for her, then performed it in front of everyone and called her to the stage during an instrumental break after the last verse to give her the ring. It was beautiful and fun and perfect, and I was so happy to get to see it up close! The look on Dolph's face was classic: there was all this light coming from his eyes, and it was clear that this was not just another performance. (He did remember to count off the end of the song, though; for a minute there, I was afraid we'd be playing that G# chord for the rest of our lives.) Derik and I gave them an engagement gift of dried bananas from Peru, courtesy of Molly Brown. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!

Dolph, Derik, Paul, and I had practiced the song several times at band practice, and Dolph had always joked during the instrumental break where the proposal was supposed to go that something was going to go horribly wrong; she'd be in the bathroom, or she'd have gone off somewhere with a friend, or she'd say "let me think about it" just to torture him. What actually happened, in the end, was that we got to that G# chord, Dolph said, "Kara, would you please come to the stage?" and... that was it. Kara was just sitting at her table, looking up at Dolph, and I was afraid she wasn't going to come to the stage at all. Afterwards, she said, "It probably seemed like a long time to you guys, but to me, the whole thing went by so fast!" She did come up to the stage, and Dolph proposed. Everyone at the restaurant was so cool, congratulating them and making a big deal of it. It was so much fun!!! Also, the ring is gorgeous.

Dolph had been trying to plan that proposal for a while, so I'm glad that they can now both relax. The past three months have been a comedy of errors of the proposal almost happening, then being thwarted because either the performance wasn't happening or Kara didn't end up attending. I'm glad I got to be there when it did happen and that I got to play on the song. It is all about me in the end, you know. Nancy got pictures:

© 2005 Nancy Myers

Talking about the lovely proposal from Sunday makes me realize I've never relayed the fun story of the proposal of Alan to Min (this is the couple who's getting married in the Hindu wedding I keep talking about). Derik and I helped Alan to plan his proposal, since he told me he'd been inspired by the elaborateness of the proposal Derik had planned for me. We were all hanging out at The Earl in East Atlanta when we started coming up with various fun proposal schemes. Some were rightly rejected, but Alan hit on a winner: to win her over with Boggle.

Now, some of you may not know that I am the Boggle Queen of the Universe. NOBODY beats me at that game. I am terrible at just about every other game in the world, but I rock the Boggle. I OWN the Boggle. Consequently, no one ever wants to play me, which makes me sad. So when I first met Mini and she said, "Alan tells me you like Boggle. Wanna play?" it was on, in a big way. The three of us played, and I have to say that Mini was a more than worthy challenger. I was genuinely worried about keeping my title 'cause the girl is good! Clearly, she is no mere hobbyist, but a hardcore fan of the game. For this reason, we decided Boggle was the way to go. We had a long conversation about weighting the cubes so they'd fall a certain way or glueing the cubes into place, but I was convinced that it didn't even need to be that complicated. "Listen," I said, "just get two Boggle games. Play using one of them, and have the other one ready to go so you can just switch them." I offered to lend him my Boggle game for the occasion. This ended up being a bit problematic, since my Boggle game is very old and has a yellow tray, whereas the brand new Boggle game he bought has a blue tray, but it all happened so fast that, in the end, it didn't really matter.

Min and Alan were dating long-distance at this time, so the proposal occurred on a weekend when she was in Atlanta for a visit. Alan picked her up at the airport and took her to a small restaurant/coffeeshop where they could eat and play Boggle. She said later that she wondered why Alan was so eager to play Boggle all of a sudden, but she just went with it. (That's kind of the best attitude to have if you're going to hang out with Alan for any length of time, let alone the rest of your life, so chalk up a point for Min.) They played a couple of rounds, and she thought they were done, but he said, "Oh, come on, let's play one more. It's my shake." He shook the board under the table (which they'd been doing all along to try to muffle the noise, since Boggle shakes are quite loud for a public place) and switched it with the one he'd prepared in advance. When he put the board on the table, it took her just a minute to figure out what was going on, and then there was the ring, and they were engaged. Their waitress congratulated them and wouldn't let them pay their check, and they were just euphoric. It had been planned for so long, and it was finally done! (This seems to be a common theme in proposal stories these days.)

© 2005 Alan Cunningham

After they had called all appropriate family members and friends to tell them the news, Alan and Min came over to celebrate their engagement with Derik and me. We shared a snack tray and a bottle of champagne and talked about our plans for the future. Alan and Min had given Derik and me a bottle of champagne at our engagement party in D.C., and it was that very bottle that we opened and shared with them that night. It felt like a perfect circle of love and happiness, and I loved being able to celebrate with them that night. They were both still high from the excitement and glowing with happiness; it was truly wonderful to see.

© 2005 Alan Cunningham

Now I've filled you in on the latest proposal stories, and you already know about my sister's happy news. So now it's time for the other side of the coin: my grandmother, Charlotte Reed Fletcher, passed away Sunday morning. Sometime between the time when I woke up and the time I left to go to Target to buy new jeans, she settled down for a nap, to get some rest, and passed from this world.

Sunday was such a busy, momentous day already that I'm not sure I've actually processed this yet. There may be sadness to come that hasn't occurred to me yet. However, the only thing I could think on Sunday was, "How wonderful." I was sad for myself because I will miss her, but for her, all I could feel is happy. I thought all day about her being reunited with Donda after 17 years and about how wonderful that must be for them. Of course, we don't really know what goes on when we leave this world, but we're humans, so, when we try to imagine it, we stick with what we know. Maybe Memommie and Donda are just particles of light, at one with the universe, not really recognizing each other at all, but in my imagination, they're together, and what's more, they have better things to do than worry about me. And so, on Sunday, I didn't worry. I played my show, and I cheered for Dolph and Kara's engagement, and I thought about the fact that Memommie wouldn't be at my wedding and that she wouldn't ever get to meet her great-grandchildren, and at the same time as I started to get sad about that, I got swept up in the larger pattern, and it suddenly felt like she had passed away at exactly the right moment. My cousin Bob has just had his first child, my cousin Lynn is pregnant, Lee is pregnant, and our parents' generation is assuming the role of "grandparents," filling the space that Memommie has left open for them. That's not to say that she wouldn't have enjoyed the new babies or the wedding or any of those things, or that I will miss her any less knowing that the next generation has arrived. It's just that it all seems mysterious and perfect and wonderful, somehow, as though we are all living in spaces that were prepared for us long before we were born.

This may sound crazy, but I have been waiting for the phone call I got on Sunday for a long time. You see, Memommie didn't like to make a fuss. The Fletchers tend to be like me: loud and fun and happiest in front of a microphone. Memommie was never the star of her own stories. She was the audience, and she was great at it. Of all of us, she was the one who spent the least amount of time in the world of the imagination, and yet she had faith as strong as any I've encountered. I always knew she wouldn't want a long illness, wouldn't want the attention that comes with dying in public. I always knew I would get a phone call from out of the blue saying, "Memommie passed away last night, in her sleep." Or maybe I just hoped that. In any case, that's what happened, and I'm glad for her because I really do think it's what she wanted.

I feel like I should be grieving more, like I shouldn't be allowed to skip straight to the lessons. I'm not sad, though. Instead, I feel very alive and very present in each moment in a way that I'm usually not. I'm not stuck inside my head, fantasizing and planning the future; I'm right here, right now. Playing my songs on Sunday, I thought, "This is here; this is now." Lying in bed with Derik when we got home, lighting a candle and saying a prayer for Memommie, I thought, "This is here; this is now." Doing squats and lunges at the gym yesterday, I thought, "This is here; this is now." I get this one body, this one life, this one chance. I'm grateful for it. I want to make every minute of it count. I want to remember the stories of the lives of my family so that we keep adding on to what's come before us. I want to remember everything my grandmother ever taught me about life, about faith, about being a good person, and I want to pass those lessons on.

You know, it's amazing. One minute, we are flesh and blood; the next, we are light and air and stories. It's a miracle; it really is.