In the middle of the afternoon towards the end of January in 1979, someone threw the fire alarm in my dorm at college.  I was in my room up on the 3^rd floor of East Hall, studying.  I joined everyone else galloping down the stairs and at the turn on the landing between the 3^rd and 2^nd floor I did something that made me twist my right ankle.  Later in the evening, after a long wait in the ER at a hospital in Lynchburg, I found out I had torn my ankle ligaments really badly and I could expect to be in a cast for 8 weeks at least.

I called home that night because I needed my parents to put more money in my bank account to cover the hospital bill. I was in pain and tired so I remember falling asleep sometime soon after that.  I’d been told to stay off my feet the next day and to come back in the afternoon to get my cast. I was still a teenager who could sleep in late.  And by the time I woke up, my mom had called the Dean’s office and the Registrar’s office and had withdrawn me from school for the remainder of my freshman year.  She had made all the travel arrangements to get from Cali, Colombia to Lynchburg Virginia, and also made reservations for us to fly together back to Cali.  She was probably packing her bags before lunch.

That afternoon, as I sat in the cast room waiting for the doctor to come in, Dust in the Wind was playing over the PA system.  I already knew all the things my mom had done and I had not stood up to her.  There was this line she could always get me with:  “you and I have worked too hard and given up too much for you to take that risk with your hip”.  She’d trotted it out first thing when she called to tell me what she’d done, insisting that with staircases and snow and ice and walks to and from class there was no way I wasn’t putting my “bad hip” at risk since I had injured my “good leg”.  I never put up a fight.  I simply collapsed into that narrative, the new sense of myself that I was working so hard to build up pretty much crushed.  I was mortified to have such a dependent relationship with my mom showcased for all my peers to see, right when we were all  beginning to figure out this business of being independent.  I felt like a coward and quitter. God, it was awful. I went home, I got through the rest of the semester working as a volunteer at Chiquitines, an adoption agency in Cali. I made the arrangements to go to summer school at George Mason University in Fairfax.  And I had no idea how fast and furious I gave into despair and depression.  I’d get over it, I’d get on with my life, in fact, my life collapsing in on itself made me rebuild, this time on firmer ground, finding my way into the Episcopal Church and faith and community.  But with a well-refined sense of drama, I decided Dust in the Wind was the theme song of that year and listened to it over and over again.

I have hundreds of songs on my iPhone and at some point in the past few years, I loaded Dust  so tonight, with the shuffle feature turned on, I walked and found myself listening to said piece of music.  Now, there are some pretty scary things going on with my work.  The ground feels really shaky under this part of my life.  I am working long hours, and trying to maintain, reassess, reinvent and reconfigure, all at the same time.  It all feels so precarious now.  It was tempting to give in to a good pity party as those violins wailed.  Instead, I found myself going back to the white board that’s taken residence in my mind, where I am keeping lists and sketching possibilities and alternatives.  I still like the plaintiveness of the song.  It’s just not my song. I managed to grow up.  I learned to stand up to my mother and then I learned how to tend to her and love her.  I’m still learning to stand up for myself and for my vision of the  ministry I’m working on, even if times get tough.

Towards the end of my walk tonight, I saw a woman walking her dog, coming towards me on Riverland Road.  As we got closer to each other, I walked under a street light and she said, “Rosa”?  I recognized her too.  She’s the wonderful physical therapist who worked with me after I had my hip replacement surgery.  She lives on my walking route. The first thing she said was that she was blown away by how well I was walking.  Yup.  I am. I no longer think of good hip or bad hip. They’re just my hips and when I’m out on my rambles and Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie plays on my iPhone, I dance down the street. I get to be the decider about risks and am much more inclined to consider possibilities.  I probably sound like a broken record, but, really, this is a miracle that keeps unfolding for me…