Julie was a step-friend. She came into my circle by marriage, having been a long-time friend of Lori’s since college days. They were never roommates - that alignment conjoined several other friends - but they played together, sang and danced together, rapped together (no small feat for two white midwestern girls in the early ‘80’s) and dreamed together. They were, in other words, friends - not “best friends” in that junior high exclusivist sort of way; their circles were wide and warm and diversely nourishing - but simply friends. Good friends. And I had the good fortune to be welcomed into the mix.
So it was that when Julie got sick a couple of years ago, the friendships became more animated. Conversations became more frequent - among the many, and between each other; visits, during those seasons when energies permitted it, became more intentional; tears and fears flowed more honestly.
But when friends from myriad connections joined family members recently for a memorial service to celebrate Julie’s life, it wasn’t the illness that dominated the gathering, nor her perseverance through the pain and limitations. It was the verve and volume of her living. And the force of it. Throughout the eulogies shared at the service, Julie was variously described as “cruise director”, “organizer”, and even “boss cow”. Routinely, Julie would be the one who set plans and events into motion, turned fantasy into reality, and transformed the fantastical (and more than once, the farcical) into commonplace. She assigned roles, established expectations, and brooked no dissent.
Julie, both friends and family attested, was a bit of a train - a moving one - and those around her had two choices: they could get out of her way, or get on board. The former was rarely desirable; the latter almost always was.
But as much joy as she derived from the orchestration, her own titillation was rarely the object. Yes, she was assertive, but Julie's directorial prowess was always in service to her instinctive passion for making connections; for putting disparate pieces - and people, and groups - together.
Which is to say that Julie was more than simply a train.
At the edge of a city where I once lived was located a train hub - a massive convergence of dozens, maybe hundreds of tracks; rails and ties extending as far as one could see. Trains from who knows where would roll into that vast network of knotted tracks, and someone had the job of managing the traffic: which cars to connect with which trains, to shift to which track, to head in what direction.
In the great train yard that was Julie’s circle of friends and sphere of influence, Julie was that director. And it gave her joy to make it happen. More than that:
She was good at it.
She had a knack for it - an instinct, innate.
She had fun at it.
She made music out of it.
She wove life out of it.
And we - yes, even me, a step-friend who accepted assignments of my own - are more beautiful because of her: grateful threads in the fabric she wove.
And hopefully we learned from her more than to simply listen and be obediently compliant. Hopefully we won’t hang the fabric she wove on the wall and admire it for what it was, but by her example risk weaving a few disparate threads of our own; connecting, building, bringing together, creating new colors by spilling a few old ones into a puddle and stirring.
It will be beautiful. I can almost hear her pronouncing it so.
And us, believing it - knowing it - to be true.
