One morning almost 60 years ago, as we watched the first snowfall of the season from my bedroom window, my mother told me that people are like snowflakes. I have kept her words with me ever since, playing with them, adding to them, trying to figure them out.
"No two ever form in exactly the same way . . ."
I have met a number of people through my work in the theater, but really only two who I think of as true friends. Like snowflakes, they have their own unique patterns.
Craig is probably the most creative and sensitive man I have ever known. I have admired his writing and directing for the past six years, since I first became involved in community theater. Two years ago, he was directing one of his own plays and he asked me to play a small role. I was 67 at the time, and never in my life been so flattered. I felt like an old lady who thought her beauty had faded but was suddenly asked out on a date. I remember wanting to say "no," to simply take it as a compliment and politely decline. I had never done any acting and the other actors intimidated me. Craig sensed my apprehension, withdrew the offer, and restated it as a command.
During rehearsals, he taught me how to use my own experiences as supplementary material, as "onions to make you cry," or as "gas to make you laugh." He taught me how to summon forgotten emotions, which keep us wiser and kinder the closer they are to the surface.
Tom is the set designer, and he, without question, has the best sense of humor of anyone I have ever known. He uses it to cure like a doctor uses drugs, modifying it and dispensing it in various doses and strengths. I remember during rehearsals having trouble with a scene in which I was to explode into laughter as another actor turned his back on me. I could not make the laugh convincing and spontaneous enough. Between takes, Tom came up on stage, patted each of us on the back, and offered us some encouraging words.
When we tried the scene again and the other actor tuned his back, there was a sign taped to his shirt that said, "KICK ME." It’s silly I know, but I’ve never laughed so hard in my life as I did then. The funniest part was the other actor did not catch on at first because he thought I was still following the script. I never had difficulty with that scene again and it still sneaks up and tickles me sometimes.
"… you’ll never know just where they will fall …," Mom said.
High school is a cloud and the students are drops of water that form into flakes and float and drift and settle to earth. No matter how carefully you watch them and follow them, it is impossible to say where they will land. When my best friend Liz got married and moved to Washington, D.C., I thought she had floated and landed far enough away from Boulder where we grew up together that I would never see her again. What I did not realize is that I too was a floating snowflake. In 1978, John was transferred and we moved right outside of Washington in the Northern Virginia suburbs. Liz and I reconnected after more than 30 years and we have been tight ever since.
John and Liz’s husband, Mike, have never become friends and, to be honest, Liz and I don’t encourage it. We like things the way they are. John and I have our joint friends, and he has his friends and his fishing, and then I have my friends and activities. It’s like we live in a house with three rooms, a big room that we share, and two smaller rooms in which we each do as we please. Recently, I renovated mine. It is now a study.
I left college as a sophomore to marry John and always told myself that someday I would go back and get a degree, but I never took any steps until after Liz and I reconnected. Liz got married shortly after high school and immediately got pregnant with the first of her four children. After her last child went off to college, Liz began thinking about college herself. By the time she and I hooked up again, she was working on her bachelor’s in psychology and planning to go on and get a master’s in social work. If Liz could do it, why not me, I asked myself. She was my inspiration, the spark that got me headed back to school. I got started on my undergraduate degree in art history in my early 50s. Then, when I was in my mid-60s, I decided to go back to school to get my master’s.
". . . they may melt in an instant or fade away slowly . . . ," said Mom.
John’s father died of a heart attack 15 years ago. My father is still living, but he’s in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s. I volunteer there one day a week and suffer with him.
Some days he knows me and other days he doesn’t believe me when I tell him who I am. I think even when he does recognize me, it’s no more than a vague familiarity, for even though his lips form my name, his cloudy confused eyes betray him. To him, I am Chary as often as I am Mary. If I correct him, he may act indifferently or may scornfully object, insisting he knows his own daughter’s name. Now when I’m Chary or Charlotte, my mother’s name, I no longer correct him. It’s so sad to see how Mother looks at him. You can see in her eyes that to her, her Brad is dead.
Sometimes I want to laugh. A nurse will tell me something he has done or said and at first I want to laugh, but only in front of the nurse because it is easier than crying. I feel guilty when I laugh because I can remember him, tall and strong and clear. He used to seem so big to me, and now he has shrunk. He is a snowflake on a cold sunny day, melting away very, very slowly.