God Help the Outcasts

A week or so ago my husband and I ran off for a day of adult fun and we took our best friend with us.  He is a doctor and has been working his butt off recently, and needed to be pushed to take a break.  Well, because of phone difficulties we had a late start, but we did get gone.  Off we headed for Legoland which has become our favorite vacation getaway, with or without the children.  As we went along we discovered that our best friend Matt had had a really bad night the night before, and was hurting pretty bad emotionally.  And along with that his blood sugar was really low, and so started to pass out.  My husband drove from that point on.  We got to Oceanside and filled him full of tacos and then finally made it to the park around 1 pm.  Being a weekend in October, it was also a brick or treat day so everyone was in costume too...I had the unpleasant discovery that Dora had a baby and Swiper was the father…yes, I am still scratching my head.  Overall we had a great day even though Matt was nodding off a lot, he thanked us profusely for taking him and being such good friends.

My husband drove home and we put Matt in the backseat to sleep the whole way.  I was listening to my iPod as my husband tried to use different background noises to help Matt sleep better.  He has an app on his phone that can do any combination of noises to help a person sleep.  He tried rain first, which I told him had to stop because it was making me have to pee.  Then he went to a waterfall which wasn't much better and Matt woke up wondering where the water was spilling.  Then he moved on to the beach and the sound of waves crashing on the shore, to which I told my husband that if he woke up asking why we drove him to the beach I was gonna hit him!  Finally he settled on trains and crickets, which at least didn’t make me have to pee!

 We made it to the stretch home, Domenigoni parkway, a long stretch of nothingness that takes you right into Hemet.  On this stretch the song on my iPod was Our Town from Cars by James Taylor...and I sat looking out at the darkness of the hills around us thinking about our best friend asleep in the back.  I thought about the pain that he had been put through, I thought about when I was put through the same pain and accusations were being made about me too that were so far from reality that I was pretty sure those people didn't care about me ever.  I knew that was how he felt; I knew he was wondering how people who were supposed to be there to support him no matter what, were saying things to him like this.  I thought about nice things I could say, but I knew that it wasn't my apology that he wanted, what he wanted was to hear those people who had said all those things to him to say they were sorry...that they were wrong.  As the lyrics to the song came through I realized a truth, James Taylor sang about "our town", but to me it was "our family" and I knew that he, like me, would stay in that seemingly god-forsaken place because it’s ours.  I tend to be a mother-bear type and want to stand in front of someone I care for and beat the crap of whoever is hitting them.  I couldn't do that here; all I could do is stand by him and provide a place of safety when he needed it.

Later when he texted and thanked us for being "real" friends, all I could say was that it was the only thing we knew how to be.  What my husband and I talked about was being outcasts, cause that is what we are, a house full of outcasts.  We have all been accosted by those who profess to love and then become the outcasts of the family when we don't affirm what they are screaming to be right.

So here's to the outcasts, may we always remember to hold each other up and take care of the new ones, because they need the support that only those who have been there can give.