May 4, 2013
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Divine Intervention
I went to (I think) the second Women’s Music Festival ever. It may have been the first. It was in Hesperia. I went alone. Drank a lot of wine. My tent was pitched out in a field on the other side of a small ditch, which caused me no serious problem when I went carried my stuff out there and which bushwhacked me big time when I headed for bed a bottle of wine later. (The ditch bushwhacked me.) I met a woman, had a good time.
I was always going to go back.
Didn’t for probably 20, maybe even 25 years.
I met Nancy. Nancy was a dedicated Festie goer.
A year after I met her she convinced me to go.
And to go to Festival, you need a beach chair.
I don’t know if these instruments or torture are even around any more–I eventually stopped looking for them. The last year or so I went to Festival I took a regular chair and sat in the back. Screw being able to hear, I needed a chair I could get back out of.
But for a while there I bought a new beach chair (or three) every year so I could go to the music concerts and be ‘comfortable’.
Beach chairs are designed for women smaller and sprier than I was. I was probably 50 then. Limped a little on the left side. Did not just ‘pop’ up off the ground for anybody. I usually broke at least one of them and sometimes two in the course of 5 days. When they broke, I threw them in the trash: but when they were…less that completely reliable, or actually unbroken, I hauled them home and kept them for festival next year. And bought about two more as back-ups.
I don’t remember exactly when I quit going to Festival. I missed one due to a scheduling conflict, and the next year it didn’t seem as important. Nancy went for several years after I quit.
Neither of us use beach chairs, or even conventional lawn chairs, for recreation in our back yard (much less use them in public.) So this motley collection of portable lawn chairs migrated slowly to the back end of our shed.
This year Nancy decided to raise chickens, and she decided the best shelter for them would be the shed. Everything in the shed came out. And we had 15 folding lawn chairs neither one of us have used for a long time now.
“I’m going to put a ‘free’ sign on them and pile them in the front yard,” Nancy planned. (She’s devoted to recycling.)
She dispatched me to make the ‘free’ sign.
I did.
Affixed my letters, one to a sheet of paper, to the chairs with…those plastic things where the end goes through an eye at the other end…
I had barely made it into the house when Nancy said, “Your letters are blowing over the chair backs and hiding themselves.”
So we went on a masking tape hunt (I won, found mine first) and she went out to tape the letters in place.
Never happened.
Two women in a station wagon drove by, stopped, said they were on their way to something and they were just wondering what they were going to sit on when *POOF* there was a very vast array of lawn chairs for FREE right there.
They said it must be a sign from God.
I did not tell them I suspect God has better things to do with his time that locate lawn chairs for people who do not plan ahead–I just helped them fold up the chairs. All 15 of them.
There is a tiny part of me that wonders how they’ll feel about their free chairs when they get wherever they’re going and someone tells them what the piano in the tree emblazoned on one of those chair actually means…I have had a little private fun imagining the conversations they may have with women who just show up out of nowhere, friendlier than you might expect…but who knows. Maybe God intended for that to happen, too.
