Sheila's Clearinghouse of Friends and Family: We lose a little on every sale, but we make it up in volume.

The past weekend I visited my family’s hometown, the one we never had.   Being an Air Force family, and then an academic one, we moved constantly and thus looked to the Monadnock region of New Hampshire – where my grandmother had her summer house – as home. 

In fact, in some ways, wishes were horses and beggars did indeed ride. 

Between 1974 and 1981, six of my ten siblings had moved to Keene, following my brother Ranger and sister Tere.  Several years after this mass northward migration, we discovered an amazing and wonderful coincidence.   My father’s father’s family, the Currans, had, for generations, lived in North Adams, Massachusetts, but after a family reuinion there, we discovered that the original Curran settlers, three brothers deported from Ireland after their participation in the Sinn Fein revolution, are all buried in the Keene cemetary.

           For over twenty years now, we’ve spent every Christmas and many summers in Keene, and even after the three youngest (Mike, Cathy and Tom) moved to Atlanta, to help Cathy’s husband Larry and his partner Martin start a business, if you asked us where we were from, we’d tell you New Hampshire, which is, more or less, true, geneologically speaking.

            The summer of 1992 was unlike others:  my brother Tom, who had fallen in love and married a Keene native, had moved home to New Hampshire.  After four years of struggling with testicular cancer (Lance Armstrong’s illness) the doctors had told him there was nothing they could do.  The disease had won.  Tom knew it was his last summer, and he wanted to spend it in the place he loved, near his wife’s family, near my parents and Tere and Ranger and so many friends he’d made in college.  One afternoon, in late June, my sister dropped in to say hello.  When she pulled into the driveway, Tere saw a man crouched over the steering wheel of an unfamiliar car.  Knocking on the window to see if he was alright, Tere saw Tom Enos, a good friend of the family, who also happened to own one of the largest funeral homes in town.  He’d just spent an hour with Tom and his wife Chris, discussing arrangements, and it was only in the privacy of his car, trying to leave the driveway, that he’d broken down into tears.  “I never do this,” he apologized.  “But Tom’s different.”

            Tommy died on July 15^th, 1992, at the age of 33.  We were all with him when he took his last breath. Shortly afterward the skies opened up and cried along with us.  At six o’clock that evening, we were at my parents’ house in Dublin when one of the children interrupted dinner to tell us we needed to come outside.  The rain had stopped and the sun had broken through again.  Hovering above the Cheshire mountains was the most spectacular rainbow.  The phone rang.  My cousins in Atanta were calling to tell us that they’d just spotted the most beautiful rainbow.  My mom hung up, but calls came in one after the other that night, from all over the country, and everyone said the same thing.  Did we know they’d spotted an enormous, spectacular rainbow?

            July 15^th has always been, since that time, an auspicious day.  Not only does my family gather together and remember our brother, but often, we’ve had extraordinary blessings coincide with the date. 

*The night of that first rainbow, a family friend took me aside and gave me the phone number of his dear friend in Phoenix, where John and I were moving.  Carolyn Scarborough, Sam’s Arizona contact, became one of my closest friends out West, taking me under her wing.  She introduced me to her network of friends, and, then, when her own mother died in 1997, she was able to share her grief with someone who could comprehend its meaning. 

*When my sister and her husband's company was sold to Ford for millions of dollars, the sale date was July 15^th, 1999. 

*In 2002, on July 15^th, I emailed an essay on the power of mitzvah (doing good for others) to my growing list of readers.  That same day a call came in to my voice mail, from a woman I didn’t know, who told me she’d heard about me through a mutual friend. She had this strong sense we needed to meet.  Jane Mcpherson, who is not at all in the habit of stalking strangers, has become my Tallahassee sister, taking me under her wing, introducing me to most of the people I know here, as well as organizing my Tallahassee book benefit on July 8^th. 

*My contract to publish Diana Lively is Falling Down, promised April 19^th  of 2004, encountered a series of unexpected delays and did not actually arrive in the mail until it was fed-exed to me, arriving July 15^th.      

All this to say that celebrating my book release in Keene on the weekend of the15^th seemed not only fitting, but perfect timing.  My sister,Tere, two years older than I, lives on Spofford Lake.  She and her husband Bob threw a beautiful cocktail party in my honor, replete with gorgeous hors d’ouevres, plenty of booze and throngs of friends, family and friends-of-friends-and-family. 

I reconnected with the lovely network of people I knew, including Tommy’s college buddies, and signed books non-stop, which gave me a chance to talk to everyone one-on-one.  My father introduced me and I read a few pages, and before I knew it, the night was gone.

I was carried along on a cloud of good karma, created by the mitzvah of Tere and Bob’s act of kindness, and by our friends' and family’s great good fortune of affection and connection, which has nothing at all to do with money and everything to do with “paying it forward” before you’re sure of getting anything at all in return.