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Essays from the Past: Create and Cultivate the Extraordinary


My wife Meg and I met when we were in college together.
When Meg tells the story, it is about us joining together to help our mutual friend Alicia with a problem that Alicia thought was a big deal.  We didn’t think it was a big deal, but both of us respected her and her feelings; we may have exchanged some smiles about it, but we took it seriously and stuck with Alicia until it was solved.
A few months later I ran into Meg by chance, at the Cumberland Farms on Route One in Wells  That was the encounter that actually started our relationship. She was riding up to college with her high school friend Carol.  For Meg and me, the relationship was kind of off-and-on for the next year. When we got back together for what turned out to be 32 years now, Carol and her mother were both in the hospital with emergency health issues.  Carol’s mom had an aneurism she was lucky to survive. Carol, by then late in her first pregnancy, was having complications. Our date turned into a hospital visit. I met strangers that day who would become lifelong friends.
Meg started at Cole Haan as a temporary worker in the warehouse.  One of her fellow temps also became a full-time Cole Haan employee.  Barb did not stay with Cole Haan the way Meg has all these years, but she remains a lifelong friend.
The preceding paragraphs are not three separate stories about Meg being a good friend; they comprise one story about Meg being a catalyst for a community of friendship, because Alicia and Barb and Carol are all friends with each other.  And the stories are only examples; I could come up with a dozen more. If someone asked how we met them the answers would be different: high school, college, work, gym, sports, friends of friends. But ask them how they met each other and the answer will always include “Meg.”
She would never consider herself a steward of society, but society is composed of ever-smaller circles of relationships, and Meg expands those circles in the most positive ways, with respect, responsibility, thoughtfulness, generosity, and love.
Sometimes it is kind of a pain.  A weekend trip ends up having three or four stops to check in with people, and as we are riding along she is sending and receiving texts, or turning down a song I like on the radio so she can talk on the phone.  On the other hand, I have great friendships with people I wouldn’t even know without her. People call me up to go paddling, or play a sport, or see a show, or eat out, or run in a race, or participate in a fundraiser.  The connection, again and again, is Meg.
Just recently I was riding with Barb, and another friend, Heather -- Barb jokes that Heather is a “Friend Stealer” for becoming friends with Meg and me -- to meet Meg and go to a play, and Barb brought up this whole concept, asking me, “What are you guys doing this weekend, having to go to five different parties because you got invited?”
Never mind parties, how many people do you know who get invited to family reunions of families they are not part of?  If you know Meg, you know at least one. And this is not just one family: Barb’s family, yes; Carol’s family, yes; but I have been to two or three other family reunions when I just knew one person because of Meg.  I was introduced to arroz con pollo at her co-worker Richard’s family’s traditional Puerto Rican pig roast up near Bangor a decade ago. I remember others: being the favored conversation partner of somebody’s brother-in-law for a couple hours somewhere on the other side of New Hampshire, and staying at Meg’s sister’s husband Bruce’s uncle’s house on Cape Cod.  When you know Meg, your family and sense of community get bigger. She doesn’t think she is extraordinary, but her influence is far from ordinary.
At a holiday dinner with Bruce’s family, I realized the cultural importance some people put on carving the meat.  We had a nice prime rib, ceremonially carved by Bruce’s father. Remembering that made me feel like an interloper when I was carving the Thanksgiving turkey or the Easter ham at someone else’s house, not just bringing the green bean casserole or the mashed potatoes.  But that is a clue to the way Meg and I become part of the larger community: I am not just a guy drinking a beer on the couch, we are not just two more place settings on the table. We cook, set the table, clear away, wash the dishes. We mow the lawn, put in the storm windows, paint the walls, fix the leaking faucet.  We bring beer, wine, breakfast, fruit salad, pie. We bring flowers. Ask anyone! We bring flowers.
Meg supports her friends and their families when they need it most.  For example, last week she visited a woman she knows through basketball who was in the hospital.  As we age, more and more, “support” means she goes, we go, to funerals. Back in our younger days I didn’t understand and was surprised when she went to a friend’s uncle’s funeral.  Sometimes I thought she went to funerals when the person she went to support just barely had a reason to go. She goes to the funeral when I think sending flowers would be excessive, sends flowers when I think a card would be enough, sends a card when I’d let it slide.
Over the years, our community has grown, and my understanding of her has too.  Some of her attitude has rubbed off on me. I join in the activities of my work community, contributing to wedding and baby showers, going to visit hospitalized co-workers, attending visiting hours for a colleague’s father.   
Years ago we went to Carol’s mother’s visiting hours and prepared food for people to come back to the house and eat.  Then we did it when Carol’s father died.
This summer and fall were tough.  Brenda’s stepfather died and we went to the service.  Then Meg helped repaint the apartment he’d lived in. A friend’s son disappeared at sea, with the freighter he captained.  That memorial service was hard to face, but I went to support my friend. The hardest thing to face was Barb’s son’s death.  He is our daughter’s age. The funeral home was full of people, old and young, who could not contain their grief. Carol and Brad, Lorene and Chris, John and Maggie -- people we introduced to Barb -- came to support her.  Meg has called or texted Barb every day since, invited her out regularly, visited her every week. Meg found a charity walk, and a bunch of us raised money and walked in Kelly’s memory.
For her altruism, her steadfastness, her central role in a growing community of friendship, she has been a role model and teacher to me for more than thirty years.  There are plenty of people of great achievement out there, but she is an extraordinary individual I see every day right here.  So every Sunday, when I go grocery shopping, I bring home flowers.

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