Better than Renn Fayre

One month ago - on October 22nd, I participated in what was one of the more rewarding nights of my life. A friend of mine had a birthday a month ago, and since school began, I'd been plotting to get her something: a bike. I figured if I got a bunch of her friends in on it, we could keep an eye out for potential bikes and all chip in some cash towards buying the bike, and maybe bike lights / lock, etc. Long story short, we found a decent one for incredibly cheap and fixed it up a bit. We planned to give it to her on the night of her birthday. Shortly before, I got an email from her saying that her father's birthday present to her was to give her money towards finding a nice bike.

Heh heh.
Oh well, we figured we'd gotten some bike lights and made a nice cardfor her at least. And some pink flowers which we used watercolor pencil to add blue highlights to - to match her blue hair with pink highlights. And we could give her the fixed-up bike anyway to do whatever she wanted to with. Maybe it could be like, a beater bike or something and her father could still get her a better bike. So we walked over to a her writer's meeting and infiltrated it. She was really happy to see us and we stayed for the rest of the meeting (at which I wrote a freewriting). Afterward, when we caused her to understand that the bike was actually for her..

It was pretty amazing.



She's been wanting a bike for a long time, and perhaps even more so, wanting to learn how to ride a bike. Let's just say that some family situations prevented her from learning how to do so earlier. I had been concerned that our little fixed-up bike would not be a good gift in light of the fact that her father offered to buy her a nice one for her birthday. But as she jumped around to hug us, and her Thankyou!'s were followed close by tears, and she told us that she didn't care about getting a bike from her father, and this bike meant more than anything he could buy because "I have friends who give a shit!", I understood more that the real gift we gave her that night was not a bicycle, but friends. And she said she felt like she had a home. She said that if she could choose a few memories, a few important images to keep for sure for the rest of her life, this one be one. She had friends and she felt at home. She said her spleen was singing (it's a metaphor). She said it was better than Renn Fayre.

And especially coming from her, that's a big deal.

She asked why we'd done it, but the response was always consistent with "Because we care."
We'd been there all along. But sometimes it's hard to show that. One of the reasons I like other peoples' birthdays is because sometimes it feels like the one day of the year (besides Christmas) when you are allowed to so obviously put time and energy into an effort to do something that makes them happy. Sometimes I wish people had birthdays every day. Maybe I'll just start pretending.

I also would like to remember that night for a long time.
Love is so hard to communicate, but I felt like, that night, we said something right.
And we said it in the right way - a way that translated so directly what we meant.

It is one of the more beautiful things in the world I think, to both have the thought, I have friends who love me! and to believe it.



She learned to ride it so quickly. We took it out to practice on the front lawn, and before long, she was riding in huge circles around us. It was no problem that she didn't know how to brake and get off yet. She just wanted to keep riding. More of her friends who couldn't be there earlier noticed and she actually got to let other people take turns riding her bike.

Then we headed into the SU to add music on top of everything else.





I felt like the night was welling up in the music that came from the piano, filling the warm lighted areas of the SU, gathered in by the dark in the corners and outside. She played for a long time, solos and duets. Music she's been working on, the image of which she explained was a dog running, reaching out to pull the ground under him. I liked this because to me, the music had felt like motion, movement - good movement when you play it fast, and good memories of good movements when you play it slowly.

But eventually, the warm, liquid falling notes of the SU piano faded and rippled away. But the evening was so good.

I don't want to forget it. I want to remember the details and play them in my head and maybe if I write this down, and post these pictures as evidence to remind me, if I practice remembering, maybe someday when I am old and forget things, it will be one of the memories I am allowed to keep. And when I think of it, it will feel like dogs running - ears back, ducking their head forward, pulling the earth in sheer joy of being alive and everything that comes with it.

I hope I remember the night when our friendship was understood, and when I understood better what that meant. The night felt honest and real and close, like if you knew where to put your hand, you could touch reality and it would feel like what was important in life.