My Boy is Back!

15 Feb 2013

My head was still in a fog today and if it weren’t for aspirin, I’m not sure I could have gotten out of bed.  My cough now comes with a nasty wheezing sound and my eyelids feel swollen.  Ugh.  I’m sure I would benefit from some medical attention, but I’m just beefing up on Vitamin C and Echinasea and prayer.  It’s really my only option as our schedule is now pretty tight. 

Kory and I spent the morning walking around picking up rocket parks from the launching area so Kaleb can “try this at home” once we buy new fuel cells.  Rocket kits are expensive, so this will take the sting out.  But finding a place to put them in the motorhome is the biggest challenge.  Our shower has turned into quite the closet so they just got piled on top of dirty laundry and all.

I was so anxious to get my boy back today, but he couldn’t have been less anxious to leave Space Camp.  His face just glowed when we showed up for graduation.  I honestly have never seen him more excited about anything in his whole life.  It was the perfect combination of things, I think.  He had a small team, only 7, when others had 16, so it was easier for them all to bond.  They were all scouts, even the girls.  They all loved science and most were homeschooled.  In fact, of all the teams there this week, his team got the Outstanding Team award.  As the announcer said, “You could hear them before you saw them.”  They were full of energy and they worked incredibly well together.  His team also got the award for the best “mission patch” which was one of their activities – to design a patch that represented their mission.  Because they won that award, their design will be scanned and put on the Space Camp website.  That was pretty cool.  And one girl on his team (who has been to Space Camp before), got the gold medal for best camper.  It had another name but I can’t remember what they called it, but it came with an Olympic looking medallion to hang around her neck.  So their team won more awards than any of the others, which only pumped up their enthusiasm all the more.

When the ceremony was over, Kaleb’s teammates all lingered. The rest of the groups departed, but none of Kaleb’s teammates wanted to leave.  They all just hung out and laughed about moments they shared during the week and cracked inside jokes.  One of the teams came from the American School in Shanghai China and it was all high school kids.  They announced at the ceremony that Kaleb’s team beat them and everyone else at some game they played last night similar to Jeopardy.  Again, it only served to pump them up more since Kaleb was the oldest kid in his group at 14 – the others were 13 or 12.  Kaleb was just floating on cloud nine.  The smile on his face said it all and it was hard to get him in the RV so we could get going.  At least he got contact info for all the kids so hopefully he’ll keep in touch with them.  I was so happy it went so well.  Whew.

We were on the road again before 1pm heading east to Atlanta.  Kaleb fell asleep not long after we took off and he was zonked out the entire 4 hour drive.  We lost another hour today as we crossed into the Eastern Time Zone and I wanted to make it to my friend Tami’s house before dark.  I used to work with her at Providence Hospital 20 years ago and we’ve kept in touch all these years.  Her sister, Bonnie, is someone I prayed for many times and is now clean and sober, married to a wonderful man and serving with the Salvation Army in California.  I actually have more contact with Bonnie, than Tami, and it’s so ironic that back in the day, Tami was all worried about Bonnie living on the streets and doing drugs, that she was happy when I told her I’d pray for Bonnie, who I had yet to meet.  Now that Bonnie’s life is solid as a rock, she’s asking me to pray for Tami!  Too funny.

It was great to see Tami again, but we didn’t quite make it before dark because Tami had given me a wrong house number so we were driving around and around trying to find her place and she wasn’t answering her phone so it delayed us just enough that we arrived after dark.  She’d invited over one sister that also moved to Atlanta and a few friends so we stood around the fire and chatted a bit before we went inside for tacos.  It was really a wonderful evening.

As the conversation moved from one thing to the next, I was shocked to hear her friend, who is a black woman, say that what we were doing was so counter culture to the south.  Only because she’s lived away from the south does she know “better” and she associates with people of other skin colors, but she said in Atlanta, Alabama and especially Mississippi, blacks don’t mix with whites socially at all.  They all have their own neighborhoods, schools and churches and there is no sitting at the dinner table with someone of another race.  I found that shocking, but then it started making sense – some of the things we’d already experienced.

When we were at the church in Huntsville last week, people were kind to welcome us during the service, but in the lobby after the service, not a single person said a single word to us.  It was weird.  Usually folks ask where you are from and how long you are in town, but it was as if we weren’t even in the room.  And a few times at a few stores I’ve been treated extremely rudely, but I just figured it was a person having a bad day so I brushed it off.  Tami said from her experience living in Atlanta now for 8 years, she’s been treated very rudely by blacks more times than she can count.  So strange!  It’s hard to believe America is still so divided.  And all week as I watched one school group after another come to the launching pad to fire off their rockets, I couldn’t understand why one group would be all black kids, and another all white kids.  It just didn’t make sense.  Now it does.  They won’t live in each other’s neighborhoods, either.

Tami told me all the black women she’s made friends with had grown up somewhere else, and they befriend her while living in Atlanta, but they didn’t last long.  They couldn’t stand the segregation so they moved away.  How weird is that?  But the other thing Tami told me is that she didn’t think she could move back to Seattle because it’s just gotten “too conservative.”  I had to laugh and remind her we just legalized smoking pot and gay marriage and you can’t get more liberal than that.  “Well, everyone is just so uptight with following the rules,” she said.  She cited jaywalking tickets or the fact people don’t park where they shouldn’t.  Apparently in Atlanta, people park in fire lanes, bus loading zones, you name it.  The rules mean nothing here and to even get a driver’s license, a person doesn’t even drive out of the parking lot of the department of motor vehicles.  They pass people for the physical part of driving without ever going out on the street!  She attributed this to the fact she’s now been rear-ended five times since she’s been in Atlanta, one of them very seriously.  Uff.

We had a lot of laughs and Kaleb kept us all hanging with some riddles he learned at camp, so it was nice he engaged in the conversation as well.  It was so nice to have him back, even if all he wanted to do is read a book.  I got some laundry done while we chatted the night away and my only complaint is that we didn’t have longer to linger.  We need to head out first thing in the morning as tomorrow I’m having dinner with another old friend in Orlando.  Life is good.  My cough is not.