thirty days of thirty years: eleven

Year eleven, age ten: September 1992-1993.

At the very beginning of fifth grade my family was spending one last weekend at the lake. I went to put my glasses back on after a turn water skiing and they snapped in half, right in the middle of the nose piece. Of course there was no solution but to tape them straight down the middle and the next day at school, as I walked down the hall to the cafeteria, a boy in my grade pointed to me and shouted, "nerd alert, nerd alert!" I have used this story in a Young Life talk to present a culturally relevant image of what it must have been like to be a leper in Jesus' time, shouting "unclean!" as they walked through the streets. The good news is that I got to pick out a new pair of glasses, just in time for school pictures. 

At this age I was spending a lot of time playing soccer, doing gymnastics, playing tag and all kinds of games with the neighborhood kids. I grew up in a really good neighborhood in the suburbs of Kansas City, where the sum of all the back yards was our playground and everyone looked out for all the kids. 

There were a lot of kids my age in our neighborhood and we were friends, for the most part. A few of the moms had been friends with my mom and they took me in a lot, if for no other reason than their affection for her. I was really good friends with this girl up the street named Erin who was two months younger than me, and I was always told that we first met when our pregnant moms held their bellies close. Erin's mom was a stay-at-home mom so during the summers or whenever we had a snow day, I would spend a lot of time at their house and be treated just like a member of the family. 

Then in fourth grade this family from St. Louis moved into the neighborhood. They had six kids and one of them was my age. We unofficially met one day a couple months later when our soccer teams were playing each other. I accidentally kicked the ball super hard into her gut and knocked the wind out of her so she fell to the ground, crying. Then when we officially met at her house a couple weeks later her mom said, "aren't you the one who kicked the ball into Angie's stomach?" I was terrified that she was mad about that so I looked down at the ground and tried my hardest to disappear. 

Other kids would come and go through time but Erin, Angie and I ended up being really good friends all the way through to the end high school, when hundreds of miles eventually separated us. It was always tolerable to not have very many friends at St. Charles because I would come home and have these girls, who I knew were my good friends. 

One day during the winter of my fifth grade year, a few of us neighborhood girls got together at someone's house and we decided to draw pictures. I wanted to draw a picture for this one woman on our block named Jan, who had let me come over to her house a lot that year just to hang out with her. One day I helped her make baked beans for her family and after that she named the recipe, "Ashley's Baked Beans," because they were so delicious. I never liked baked beans but I took her word for it. 

Although I didn't realize I was doing it at the time, I can see that I was pursuing maternal relationships. I think that when there is a significant void in someone's life like the one I had, the natural thing to do is to seek out these precious moments to bridge the gap between what is and what should be. I am so thankful for the women throughout my life who let me into their homes and hearts. 

So we were drawing pictures and I decided to draw an angel in Nike tennis shoes. My fifth grade teachers used to go on and on about how creative and artistic I was and I guess this is just one example of that. I love how total randomness can so easily be classified as creativity. Anyway, I gave that picture to Jan and I am certain that for the rest of her days she will cherish it. She used to stop me on the street as I got older and tell me that she still had that picture hanging on her wall, and that it was one of her treasures so if her house ever caught on fire she would save it. Even just a couple years ago my brother bumped into Jan and she told him to tell me that she still had that picture of the angel in Nike tennis shoes.