blogger profile

Ginger

READ MORE

Creating Magic

by Ginger

A dear friend of mine had a very hard week last week, and there will be some more challenges in the week ahead. He went to the doctor and heard what all of us fear hearing: “There’s something unusual. We don’t know exactly what it is. But you need to cancel whatever you’re doing this Friday and come in for more tests.”

It’s that last line, “Cancel whatever you’re doing” that causes the most concern. If they had said, “Just come in on Monday; Monday’s fine,” then the days waiting until the test would not have been so bad. In fact, I wondered why they couldn’t have just said this? Would 48 hours really have made such a difference? I believe it would have made a difference in the level of fear that ran throughout my friend’s mind and body…

Part two: they ran the tests. The day was stressful. My friend – who is brave and funny and optimistic in the face of everything else – has a huge fear of needles. He managed through the hours of being poked and scanned and studied, but at the end of the day, he was exhausted just from this. The news? Inconclusive (and of course, on a Friday afternoon at 5, there was no physician standing by to read the results. So he’ll have to wait until …? You guessed it: Monday). The only thing he knows for sure is that there will have to be another test next week. More needles.

I took some time yesterday to hold a space of good health and peace for my friend. I talked to the world and asked it to send powerful healing to him right now. I talked to him, and reminded him that his own hopefulness and faith in the world – faith that everything will always turn out all right – is what he needs now more than ever. I practically commanded that he conjure up his most powerful positive thinking, and I sent waves of affirmations over the phone line.

Now this is a friend who, if the tables were turned, would have (by the end of the morning) turned the hospital testing room into a personal space that defined me. He would have brought in a few select accessories – a lamp here, a throw there, oversized pictures that did something special like make it look as if the sun was setting in the background when you dimmed the lights. He would have taken store-bought flowers and tucked them into unusual vases and hidden secrets in the bouquets. He would have taken the magazines and stacked them in such a way as to create a staircase for a tiny porcelain character. He would have covered the glaring fluorescents and masked the metal blinds. He is, by trade, a designer; he is, by God’s creation, a magician, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.

His clients are not just his clients – they become his friends and he their confidante. Because of his love of people and generosity of spirit, people tell him stories and secrets they might never have told a soul. But he listens and laughs and cries with us who tell, and then something delightful happens…

In the weeks and months and years ahead, we hear him telling our stories to his other friends – at a party, at a meeting, on the phone -- and suddenly our stories take on a mythical life of their own.  He embellishes the scene and the setting… makes larger than life the players – our sisters, our children, our parents…lays silk fabric across the parts of the story that expose our own faults…and with the love of a father, shines a spotlight on the parts of the story that show our best selves – parts that are hidden deep within the tale. 

And as only a magical friend can do, he touches us all with the stories of his friends, and makes us all a little better by knowing these stories, and knowing them through his twinkling eyes.

And so I know there will come a day – just a few weeks from now – when we will hear the stories of his ordeals at the hospital. We will hear about the nurse who put both her husband and child through med school … we will hear about the doctor who travels thousands of miles each year to help the sick in a third-world country … we will hear about my friend’s partner and the way he loved him and held him and made him crazy all at the same time – and with whom he could not have gotten through this battery. And the funniest, most enlightening and most poignant stories he will tell on himself – we will hear his fears, his joys, his sardonic observations of his own humanness – and we will laugh and cry and shout together, recognizing in his stories the secrets of our own souls.

And as January fades, these cold memories will fade, too, and good health will shower him in abundance.

No more tests. No more unusual activity. And for my extraordinary friend, they’ll tell him something he rarely hears: “You’re normal. Everything’s normal, they’ll tell him.”

You’ll have to find some other stories to tell.