Sorry I haven’t written any new posts in a while; I might be away for a few more days. My brother Luke is coming to college for the first time, and I’m trying to help him settle in.
Hopefully, I’ll have more adventures to write about when I come back! :)
Ryan and I just had a nice little walk outside . . . the temperature was just right, the mosquitoes (for once) weren’t sucking the life out of us, and a beautiful butterfly drifted past our heads. To complete the perfect perfection of the evening, there was even a Mr. Chippy’s ice cream truck parked nearby, playing merry tunes for the kiddies.
Or, at least, I thought the song was merry until we got a little closer. The closer we got, the creepier the song sounded.
I elbowed Ryan. “Don’t you think that song’s a bit weird?”
“Yeah . . . it sounds more like a dirge. Or like the Harry Potter theme song.”
“Hey–What if the driver lunges out when we go by, and he looks like the clown on It?”
“Ugh. Stop it!”
We passed the truck uneventfully, and our only regrets were that we left our spare change at home. As we turned the corner of our block and walked toward our house, we talked about enlightening topics like Choco Tacos and whether bats ever see daylight.
Then–all of a sudden–I heard the soft purr of tires behind us. And Mr. Chippy’s eerie death music floated up the street. I turned . . . and saw the ice cream truck slowly drifting toward us.
I poked Ryan. “Aah! Walk faster.”
He only laughed and pretended to power walk. (Which tells me he’ll probably be the first to go if there’s ever actually a crazy ice-cream clown on the loose.)
Despite my visions of being scooped up (haha–pun) and churned into a new ice cream flavor, the truck only drove into another neighborhood and waited patiently for the kiddos to hear its siren song.
I laughed. “Phew! That was close. What if they caught us and turned us into ice cream slaves? Would you like to be an ice cream slave?”
“Depends on the benefits.”
“What do ice cream slaves do all day?”
“Eat ice cream.”
“That’s not a job.”
“Sure it is.”
“What if you ate all their ice cream and got super fat and they kicked you out?”
“Well, good. I guess I escaped, then.”
Glad to know we’re prepared for every possibility.
Somewhere in the crevices of my bookshelves or in one of the many boxes that line my storage room is a very special stenographer’s pad. It’s tattered, scribbled on, and probably would’ve been thrown out years ago if it didn’t mean so much to me. If you were to find it and turn to the first page, you’d probably see a journal entry (garishly written in hot-pink pen) that says something like this:
MArch 3, 1993. I lOve MaRk.
I was about five when my dad decided that I should start journaling. To get me started, he gave me the green stenographer’s pad. I was really excited about having my very own journal, but when I started to write, I realized I had a big problem. What would I write about? I asked my dad, and he had a simple answer: “Write about what you love.”
So, for days afterward, my little journal filled up with entries like “I LoVe MOm,” “I loVe my Pollie-pocKets,” and “I lOve MaRk” (my brother). As I got interested in other things, that first journal gradually began to serve other purposes. Like holding descriptions of the “discoveries” I made with my plastic microscope (my first big purchase).
When I turned eight, I started journaling semi-faithfully again, this time in a little baby-blue journal with a picture of Peter Rabbit on the front. My first entry went like this:
Dear Diary. Tuesday 3/5/96. Warm and Windy. I Got my Free Shoney’s meal. I turned 8 today. I felt big. For lunch I got my free Burger King happy meal. We had School.
In the following days of 1996, I journaled about things that were important to me, like my struggles with math (“I was mad. I was also sad.”); a snow day (“I played outside today, and I broke off icicles. We hardly had Shcool at all today.”); and parties (“I knocked the Pinata’s Head off!”) On one particular day, I was pretty busy:
We had School. We play follow-the-ball. I made a mud pie. I unscrewed the screws out of the trailer. I played with a nail. I played with Luke. I played with sidewalk chalk.
I wrote in that journal on and off from 1996 to 2000, telling about things that were happening in my world, whether they were big (“We are just playing around, and waiting for 12:00 when Y2K comes. . . . The power may go out. We are prepared.”) or small (“6th grade is the best!”).
As the years went by, I stopped journaling about happy meals and mud pies and started writing about crushes, teen camp, and high school. New journals began to pile up–some were covered in fake jewels and felt flowers, one had a weird picture of Shakespeare on the front, and some were just simple hard-cover journals with one major color on the outside.
It wasn’t always easy to keep writing in my journals every day, especially when I got to college. Part of a journal entry from September 2006 shows what a stressed little freshman I was:
So much homework–so much juggling. Very scared. The college monster is bigger than I thought–sometimes I feel like running home. God’s here tho–He reveals Himself in so many little ways throughout the day.
And another entry just ends with “My . . .” because I was writing after lights-out and got caught.
In my senior year of college, I began writing faithfully in my journal every day, but I found it increasingly hard to write as that year ended and my (CRAZY) grad-school self appeared. Notes at the beginnings of entries show that I started writing at times like 1:21 AM and even 3:21 AM. But on March 9, 2011, my friends somehow got me to take a little break from my constant studying and go to dinner at Zaxby’s. Which is when I found out that they’d lured me into a blind date. My entry from that night shows my indignation:
We went to dinner at Zaxby’s tonight with Ryan Guide (? . . . “guy-dee”). . . . The actual setup was a failure tho–he was friendly enough, but . . . he seemed more interested in his fries than in me.
Ultimately, I was the one who was wrong. Here I am, over two years later, happily married to Ryan Geide, but it’s still fun to look back and read about how blind I was. And as the months have gone by and we’ve shared so many adventures together, my journaling continues.
Over the course of my life, I’ve written about amazing, exciting days when everything felt like sunshine. And I’ve written about days when everything felt dark and broken. I’ve written about being lonely and about being loved. About births and deaths. About the life that God’s blessed me with. And I’ve never regretted writing it all down.
So, a few of you contacted me recently about possibly starting up this blog again, and my thought was . . . why not?
To the few fans I still have, I hope you’re still there and still willing to listen. I’m sorry I abandoned you for so long! If you want me to make amends–there you go, I just smacked my hand as punishment for my laziness.
Now the question is, what to write about? Perhaps about yesterday’s adventure with the giant spider (which I squashed valiantly)? Or maybe an ode to my poor, departed pansies (may they rest in peace)?
We’ll see, but for now–I’m just happy to be talking to you again!
Small Adventures 