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When I moved to Murphy a year ago to start a new life, my old one, so comfortable and cherished, was beyond my reach. It lay buried in my ex-husband’s mistress’ back garden. And I assure you that there was no commemorative tombstone.
I had built a life on a tandem bicycle and here I was, going solo on a bike I felt was missing one of its wheels. For the first few months here, I pretended to be a sassy, independent thriving human –but behind the scenes, sitting on my back porch in a rocking chair set up for two, I felt more like a shadow. I was that wisp of smoke that swirls up to the ceiling after the candle has been blown out.
And, in the beginning, I didn’t feel Murphy provided enough oxygen for me to spark a new flame. In those early months, I complained to a girlfriend from my old life. “I’m not meeting anyone. No one has been to my house for tea,” I lamented.
“Abigail,” she said sternly, “You never leave your house.” I hadn’t considered that the root of my loneliness might lie under my overly appreciated sofa.
I started out small, like a superficial conversation with the gal in the spice aisle at Ingles, a “What is the difference between coriander and cilantro” type of thing. I visited a church and, as kind as they all were, they were synchronized swimmers in a pool where I flapped about in water wings.
However, I had more luck when I joined the Rotary Club of Murphy. They met once a week, and this frequency allowed me the opportunity to observe them. You can’t call it “stalking” because my curiosity never left the room. I never followed anyone home, for example, to pick through their garbage bins.
But what I would, and still do, is watch them all, listen intently and outrageously eavesdrop. What I discovered was that the room was full of scaredy cats just like I was.
The ratio between transplants and natives seemed balanced in our club, and the income stratification hovered in that ghostly spot where the middle class used to sit. Our ages were all over the place, from elderly to impossibly young.
The younger members impressed me. When I was in my 20s, the only club I joined was a loosely thrown together group of misfits, scrunched into our favorite booth at the Flamingo Grill where, mercifully, they did not grill flamingos.
The Rotary Club, while organized and led by popular folks in town, made room at the table for those of us who couldn’t get a date to prom. The categories meant to define us in Murphy, those who eat sushi and those who do not – I do – or those who have a family plot and those who don’t – I don’t – became blurry, nearly
insignificant.
For one thing, their mission is to serve the community; they’ll do anything from, reading books to school kids to picking up trash people toss out their car windows downtown. So their focus is outward and energizing.
However, the secret sauce of feeling so connected to a group of people very unlike me is that, stripped of the labels we present at the initial handshake, we were all scared. Scared of what people might think if they saw us emotionally naked. Scared that the closets in our houses might one day be opened for public viewing, or that our family member’s indiscretion might somehow diminish our own
reputations.
Many of us merrily eating every Monday are terrified that the secret way we feel about ourselves on the inside – unattractive, not enough money, not as smart as the girl next to me, in a marriage that takes more than it gives, perhaps a little bored by life or dulled by pain – may one day seep through our protective armor revealing a vulnerable underbelly. So, yes, we are scaredy cats in there, and I’m an authority because I tune into whispered conversations and draw conclusion from the prayer requests bandied about before the predictable opening prayer.
But the glory of the lot of us rests in the fact that, despite these internal insecurities and fears, we keep showing up; we keep reaching out; we keep believing that today will be better. And that, of course, makes us unassailably brave.
Now stop throwing your trash out of your car window. We are made of better stuff than that.
Abigail Hickman is a staff correspondent for the Cherokee Scout. Her column runs every other week. Email abigailhickman44@gmail.com.