Today’s blog
Lynn Murphy Mark
What a day!
Yesterday was a great day. It was all about Unity stuff, meals with friends, an accumulation of almost 7,000 steps, and topped off by a performance that had me laughing until I coughed. At the end of the day we met a person who, out of the blue, helped us find the best way out of the theater.
That actually may have been the highlight of the day, believe it or not. She is an employee at the Stifel Theater, aka the old Kiel Auditorium. She didn’t have to do it, but she recognized that we were having trouble with stairs so she ushered us out a different way. We were trying to find our way out. She was in her wheelchair, stationed outside of a room that was closed off. People tried to go through the door and she waved them towards the stairs, informing them that the area behind the door was closed off. She took one look at us and quietly told us to stay by her. When the last of the people trudged up the stairs she opened the magic door that led to an elevator and an escalator in a “members only” room. She wheeled her way to an elevator, chatting pleasantly with us and giving us directions to the best way out of the building. I don’t know why this touched me as deeply as it did. Maybe because she was being a kind human who recognized our struggle and reached out to help. This was one of her Mitzvah’s for the day.
Four of us met in the morning to conclude our prayer chaplain training and to establish our goals for 2024. We are a small group, three prayer chaplains and our minister. It was a productive meeting and we know what direction we want to point in next year. One of our goals is to get together outside of our formal meetings and get to know each other better. We already know a lot about each other’s lives because we start our meetings with a check-in and requests for prayers for our personal issues. But this is serious work, and we decided we need to lighten up sometimes and just be with each other. We went to Dulayney’s Irish Pub and had lunch.
The Irish pub was a prequel to the performance we went to after a nice dinner out with a different set of friends. Kathleen Madigan was the headliner and she packed the large auditorium with passionate fans. She’s a shorty, with reddish long hair and a bit of a gut. (Now that reminds me of another very funny human, Wanda Sykes. Wanda has a bit of a gut – who doesn’t at our age? Anyway, Wanda has named hers, “Esther”…). Kathleen worked us into a laughing frenzy for an hour and a half of non-stop talking. Honestly, I don’t know how her mind must work, but she sees the absurdity and the irony in everyday occurrences. She talked about her aging parents, our aging politicians – she says our country is being run by a Florida bridge club – and her admiration for the “Yeah. No!” generation of millennials. She took a wine snob friend of hers to a trashy lake bar, and when he asked if there was a wine list she pointed to a wall decoration. It was a stuffed squirrel holding a tiny banjo that someone had shellacked and attached to a board and hung it proudly behind the bar. “No there’s no wine list!”, she said, “This kind of place only has the red, white, and pink kind that they keep in the freezer.”
So, my day started with prayer and ended with laughter. That’s how I’d like to spend all my days.