Oh Texas, Will You Take Care of Me?

And now we enter the end of the beginning.

Thanks for stopping by! If this is your first time here. I write stories that I hope will help you feel a little less alone and a little more encouraged. My stories are personal ones, memoir in style. If you like what you read, please subscribe! There are also podcast versions as well.

If you are a subscriber, thank you for traveling with me so far! If you need to catch up - start with The Agent of Change, Part One.

Also, before I continue my story, I am publishing this one day after Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II has gone to her glory. It is all so very epic, isn’t it? Oh, my heart. I cried when I watched the new King Charles III (so Shakespearean) address his nation. I was a little puddle. We all have those moments where we knew exactly where we were when we found out X, Y or Z happened. As the new king said of his Mama, “May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

And as Paddington Bear said, “Thank you, Ma’am. For everything.”

Why as an American am I so moved? Who cares! Our hearts are broken! The Queen is dead. Long live the King! Even though we don’t have one, there’s a little part of me that likes knowing there is one.

Perhaps if this beloved queen had been sovereign 246 years ago instead of her ancestor, George, we’d all still be Brits. Now, that was a weird thought.

In addition, it just occurred to me the you are receiving this on September 11. I know you knew where you were then. Oh the woe. No words. But some things must be acknowledged. I was in Los Angeles on my way to work. I turned my phone on and there were several messages telling me to stay at home. Of course, we all ended up at home for a few days. In a grief stricken daze. The Queen had the royal band play our national anthem at Buckingham palace. What a sovereign.

If you lost someone on this day, I am so sorry. I am praying for you right now as I write this.

You are loved. You are so very loved.

---

Oh, Texas… Will You Take Care of Me?

I’ve moved a lot in my time. Actors. Sublets. Couches. Visits that turn into stays that turn into sublets that turn into taking over a lease that turn into giving up the lease and the beat goes on.

I don’t know when it happened, but I started wearing a blue cowboy hat every time I moved. It was my own little tradition. As I packed up the car with the help of family and friends who’d helped me move numerous times over the years, I wore that hat again. Want to know who your true friends are? Ask them to help you move.

I still have her. The hat. She’s a little bruised now but she sits on the top of the closet shelf now. I can’t be sure, but I think she gives dirty looks at my husband now and then; assuming him at fault for the current state of “settled-ness”. She would be correct.

It had come time to say goodbye to NYC for the second, and in my mind, last time. I’d been saying a lot of goodbyes over the past months. They were bittersweet. In the truest sense. I had bitterness over what New York meant to me and how things seemed to have rolled out - the successes but mainly the scourges. My goodbye to the vicar was filled with gratitude, hope, and trepidation of what would, or worse, would not, come.

It was she who influenced me to return home, only voiced after I had come to it myself. It was she who loved me into the courage to be near my family. It was she who ushered me into the hope that I could be healed from what I perceived as insurmountable mountain of whatever it was that was growing inside me.

And, in the end, it was she who whispered two last things to me that opened doors I didn’t even know existed.

She called me “Mother Phillips” (for Phillips was my name at the time) in the context of a type of spiritual motherhood she perceived in me. Not only through my role as a teacher but in a new and heightened capacity as a shepherd of the spirit.

And then there was a prophecy.

Big word, I know. But as this is a story taking place within and around the walls of a sacred space, the word used to describe her ability to see something that had not happened yet has to be archetypal. Holy.

So I say, she prophesied over my life.

He is waiting for you. He’s been waiting for a long time. He’s almost lost hope.

She wasn’t speaking about God. She was speaking of marriage. Not in the spiritual sense either. No. She actually saw that I would be married. That I would meet him in Texas and that he’d been waiting a long time. That he’d almost “lost hope.”

“I’m not really supposed to do that,” she quietly confided as I left her office for the last time. I conveyed her secret was safe with me.

I never saw her again. You might think that I zoomed out of her office with a great hope that I was about to meet the “one” and lost all of my worry in the exuberance of true love.

Nope. I pretty much forgot about it. I had too much to think about. Plus… who could that be? Whoever he was, he was going to have to present himself because I was not on the lookout.

So my last day in New York City began with a final class I taught, my new-to-me SUV parked beneath the building packed up by my family and friends and the hat in the front seat waiting for me.

I pulled out of the garage on the upper west side in pouring rain on a May day and figured out for the first time just how to drive out of the city through the Lincoln Tunnel, very unromantic, and blogged all the way south.

And that is the end of the beginning of the loss of my life to save it.

I crossed the border from Arkansas into Texas and began to cry.

Do you know that feeling? The feeling of coming home after so long? You didn’t know how far away you’d roamed….

Oh, Texas…

Will you take care of me?

Short epilogue before the beginning:

I made it to Austin to the new sublet. Unpacked everything I owed in under an hour. Crashed asleep. Got up early the next morning to report to my new job.

Flat tire.

I’d just made it.

Here we go.

So what’s next? That’s easy, Friend.

Miracles.

First miracle. An up to date account with Triple A and new friends who’ll swing by to pick up for work on your first day.

I cannot wait to tell you what was in store… human beings rarely think that big for themselves.

---