The Game of LIFE

About this time every year, I get nostalgic for a lot of things—for my old friends, for changing leaves, for the sound of football games (a.k.a. tailgates) and, quite simply, for the Midwest. Yet, at the same time I’m filled with happy fall memories, a familiar sadness seems to settle inside my soul. It’s kinda like Sunshine Barbie and Debbie Downer deciding to throw a party together.

Someone somewhere told me once that a shift in seasons can trigger memories deep in your heart—both happy and sad—and sometimes it takes a while for your head to catch up and get a clue. For me, it’s the shift to fall that dredges up a mixed bag of emotions.

I remember in vivid detail driving home to St. Louis after a weekend with friends in Bloomington, Indiana. It was September of 1997. Rather than take the highway, I decided to drive a two-lane backroad for as long as I could. A Son Volt cassette was blasting, the windows were down and colorful trees lined both sides of the road.

I’d just accepted a job in San Francisco and knew that my life was changing. Forever. And the tears just came rolling out. They were happy tears for making a dream come true all by myself, but they were also big fat sad tears for all that I was leaving behind. In my mind, it was the end of an era and I don’t handle good-byes well…with people, places or moments in time. Little did I know then that the biggest good-bye of my life was yet to come. A month later, on October 30, 1997, my youngest sister died.

I still moved to San Francisco in November and went about trying to create a life for myself, but honestly the first years after my sister’s death are, at best, a blur. I look back at pictures and I hardly recognize myself. I was lost. Profoundly lost. Somehow, some way I scraped and clawed my way out of the black hole of depression, sadness, loss and loneliness I’d fallen into and began to see glimpses of blue sky. But it was hard. Damn hard. Before I knew it, my calendar said September 2002. And a few weeks later, I met the MR. How fitting it was to meet the man that was to become my best friend…in the fall.

After going through two miscarriages in the last two years (both in the fall) and a failed match with a birth mom in September this year, I decided it was time to stack my deck with some happy fall memories. To be with friends. To be in the Midwest. To laugh and laugh and laugh. Because I was sick and tired of tears. So I headed to Indianapolis to spend the weekend with the same two friends I was with back in September of 1997 when I accepted my job in San Francisco.

We drank Bud Lights. We laughed. We played Go Fish with my friend’s two daughters. We sang “Don’t Stop Believin” at the top of our lungs in the car on the way to dinner. We danced in the living room ‘til 1 a.m. We visited IU and reminisced about working at Kilroy’s Bar as seniors. We talked about our college loves (and how they were mostly fools). One of us did a cartwheel in Dunn Meadow (not me). We tooled around the cul de sac on Betsy’s Vespa back at the house. We shot hoops (at least we tried) in the neighbor’s driveway. We drank more Bud Lights. And then we played the board game LIFE.

Now I really didn’t know much about the game. My family didn’t play LIFE when I was a kid. We liked CLUE (Miss Scarlett in the Study with the Candlestick, anyone?) and I also remember playing King’s Corner with our babysitter Mrs. Lilly, who seemed at least 150-years-old to me at the time. So it was a learning curve with me and LIFE. The first question I had to answer before I could spin the dial was: Do you want to go to college? If I said yes, I’d start the game $40,000 in debt. Well, that just sounded ridiculous, so I decided to take my chances and skip higher education all together.

Once that decision was made, I drew two cards to determine my occupation and salary. Turns out I was an entertainer who made $70,000 a year. Now I’m assuming that by “entertainer”, the makers of LIFE didn’t mean stripper, so in my mind, I pictured myself with an acoustic guitar touring the country, singing and writing songs. And that’s when it started to get a little weird.

It was like I went into fantasy mode, creating this parallel life for myself. Let me tell you, it was FUN! I bought a cool two-level loft in a big city. I got married. I had a son. I adopted twins. I changed careers and became a cop who made $100,000 a year. I won the Nobel Peace Prize. And last but not least, I retired with $1.6 million. I gotta be honest, I didn’t want the game to end.

But end it did, leaving me to continue playing my own personal game of LIFE, where seasons change and people pass, where Sunshine Barbie and Debbie Downer hang out, where all I can do is move forward one square at a time.