This is probably the most personal blog post I’ve written yet. It didn’t even start out to be a blog post, so much … I just wrote it because I had to. Then I decided to share. This was originally written two weeks ago (damn, tempus fugit!) when I was returning from my trip to Missouri.

What an adventure-filled week! I left last Saturday morning for Springfield, Missouri, home of the ConductMom and a few of the ConductCousins. A bunch more CC’s came in from DC and Texas, and the night of the Fourth was a country idyll of grilled meats, kids running around with sparklers, and homemade country and gospel music, which sounded a lot better after I added a few surreptitious shots of Jack Daniels to my sweet tea. (I stopped doing that when I realized I’d had enough to actually think it might be a good idea for me to join in on “Ring of Fire.”)

The next day, I learned to fire a gun! I have never so much as touched a gun in my life, so I asked my cousins, who grew up shootin’, to larn me, and so they did. I believe it might be an acquired taste. I didn’t care for it much while I was doing it, but more than once subsequently has the thought crossed my mind that firing off a few rounds at a range might not be a bad way to work off the stresses of the day. I still have no sense of how good a markswoman I might be; we just fired into trees, which were all still standing at the end of the day.

I certainly look good holding a gun, just like everyone does. Guns and cigarettes are deadly and horrible inventions; why must they be such terribly appealing props? It’s not the phallic aspect; no one looks terribly sexy wielding a zucchini. I wish I could have used this photo for my book jacket. If anything says “This isn’t your grandmother’s etiquette book”:

(photo credit: Doug Gallo)

Heh.

The ConductMom and I then drove to Kansas City on Monday. KC was the home of my 20s, my theater years, my wild “Shiksa in the City” single days, and I hadn’t been back for 10 years or so, not since my own parents moved south. I reunited with several dear friends whom I hadn’t seen since high school or college, appeared on a couple of the same shows that I used to book actors on when I was a theater publicist, and gave a reading at the bookstore I spent my Saturday afternoons at as a teenager, to an audience that included my high-school librarian, the mother of a toddler I used to babysit (now a fifth-grade teacher going for a master’s, with two children of her own), my boss from my first real job, and Kansas City’s version of J.J. Hunsecker, who knows all my most scandalous secrets.

I got a past, okay? We all do. And mine’s been a little more complicated and contradictory than most people’s, I suspect, and I encountered a whole lot of it all at once this weekend.

I feel as though I should have some profound thoughts about this, but I don’t. Except that, somehow–it was all okay. I don’t mean not awkward, I mean deeply, existentially, transcendentally okay.

“Shalom” means “peace,” as most folks know, but it also means “wholeness.” Because peace can only come when all the parts come together. This was a week of deep shalom for me.

A week of shalom in the summer of Spock! Because that Hadassah lady was more right than she knew. I don’t just look like Spock. Like that pointy-eared halfbreed, I’ve had a long, hard road to shalom, to wholeness. I was born with a passionate heart and an overcharged brain. I was raised with some painfully conflicting values. Some of the chapters of my life don’t read like they’re from the same book as others do.

But somehow, that week, all those disparate elements of my life came together, and damn if it didn’t just work, just like the Golden Rod Rainbow Stripe Shawl Sweater Shrug Cardigan does. You wouldn’t think all those colors would swirl around and play instead of clashing, but they do.

They did.

And I am stopped dead in my tracks with gratitude and wonder and love every time I think of it.

And the reason I’m wrote this–well, I wrote most of it on the plane on the way back to Boston, because it was in me and had to come out. The reason I’m posting it, the reason I want to share it with you, is because I know I have readers in high school, in college, in their early 20s. And if you’re struggling with how to put the different parts of your life together–people from your past and present, family and friends, what you were taught and what you’ve decided for yourself, goals and dreams that don’t seem that they could be part of the same person’s life–I want you to know it can work out. It’s supposed to take a while, I think, so be patient. But it can happen.