Ode To Joy

I was posed the question recently, “What brings you joy?” I didn’t have an immediate answer to that question. To be honest, I couldn’t think of much in my current world. Adulting has been particularly difficult lately. With that in mind, I began to look to my past to try to answer the question.

When I was in grade school many simple things brought me joy. Thinking about those days, I immediately thought about the swings on the playground at Long Creek Elementary. They were the type with stout metal chains that dropped at least twelve feet from the heavy metal frame with thick bands of black rubber as seats. Even when school was out for the summer my friends and I would sometimes walk to the school to play on that playground. I vividly remember climbing into one of those rubber sling seats, using my toes, which barely reached the red clay ground beneath me, and getting a push off start. I remember swinging my legs out on the upswing and back beneath me on the downswing, building momentum until it felt like I was even with the top bar that supported the swings. There was joy in the feeling of weightlessness, of flight, of freedom. 

I thought next of the joy I always got from diving into our swimming pool on hot summer days. It wasn’t just about the immediate relief from the heat of the sun on my skin. I have always felt I must’ve been a mermaid in a former life. Being under the water’s surface, all sound muffled, feeling the water caress my skin, made me feel alive and, ironically, grounded. I loved doing cannonballs or backwards dives off our standard diving board, but I was overjoyed when we stayed at a hotel on vacation that had a high dive. The higher, the better. The sensation of flying through the air and the anticipation of breaking the surface of the water was something I could never get enough of, no matter how pruny my skin became.

Even better than the pool was the ocean. Almost all of our vacations were beach trips. My brother and I would play in the ocean for hours on end, riding the waves on canvas floats or body surfing, letting the awesome power of wave after wave carry our bodies back to the sand over and over again. The rush of feeling the ocean propel our bodies, made more aerodynamic with outstretched arms and pointed toes, was pure joy to me!

I recall the joy of riding my bike, pedaling as hard as I could for as long as I could, then coasting along, sometimes with no hands! There was a hill in our neighborhood that I loved to fly down until the day I was racing my older brother and my front tire went into a pothole and I went flying over the handle bars, landing on my chin and left knee, leaving a deep gash in both. Thank God for Dr. Seay’s stitchery skills; the scars barely show today.

Even that didn’t take the daredevil out of me and I remember many more trips down that hill at full speed on my bike on sunny days or on my sled on snowy days. Snow was always a joyful event for me. Back then, it seemed like we got at least one decent snow a year. We were usually in school when the flurries started and the excitement and joy burst out of all of us kids. We lived for early release from the school day and the walk home in the snow. We prayed for at least several inches so we could drag out the sleds. When we didn’t get enough snow for that, we were still overjoyed to participate in snowball fights and snowman construction.

Trips to the library also brought me joy. I took home as many books as I was allowed and was always finished with all of them and ready for more by the time our babysitter took us back to the library the next week. The escapism of reading has always been an important part of my life. I’m happiest when I am on a beach, in a hammock, on the back deck, or in the bathtub with a book. Discovering new authors I loved was like an introduction to a drug. I wanted more and more of the good stuff. I read everything Judy Blume and S.E. Hinton wrote and longed for more. The bookmobile visiting our school, stuffed with books to sell, was the highlight of my school year in elementary school. Taking home an armload of books that were all mine was nirvana to me.

Very little about junior high (or middle school, in today’s parlance) was joyful for me. The highlights were mostly music-related. I fell in love with Andy Gibb when I was twelve or thirteen. His music made me joyful and his looks didn’t hurt me any either. My room was plastered with thirteen posters of him purchased from Kmart or pulled from the pages of Tiger Beat Magazine. Getting to see him in concert at the Carowinds Paladium made my year in the summer of 1978.

Come to think of it, many joy-filled days were spent at Carowinds Amusement Park. Every year my friends and I purchased season passes. It blows my mind to think of now, considering how protective my mother was, but a group of us were dropped off by one parent or another as many weekend days as we were able from the time the park opened in Spring until it closed in Fall. We would stay eight or ten hours each time. I loved the rush of the Thunder Road roller coaster and the whoop-de-do upside down loop of the White Lightnin’ coaster. Those parent-free days provided some of my first real feelings of freedom, even though we required a ride to get there.

The music lover in me adored the Paladium Amphitheater at Carowinds as much, if not more, than the rides. I saw dozens of my musical heroes there. The venue was so much more up close and personal that the concerts I saw in my later teens at the Charlotte Coliseum. Though the day I saw Andy Gibb at the Paladium was one of the hottest I can remember enduring in my life, being fourteen rows from Andy was worth the heat stroke I thought I might have. When I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with my brother and his friends or one or another of my close guy friends absorbed in the music of Molly Hatchet, Tom Petty, James Taylor or Andy Gibb, I was filled with joy and the usual noise in my head about the mean girl bullying I was experiencing from a few former friends at school faded away.

That ability to lose myself in music led to dozens of concerts at the Charlotte Coliseum during my high school days. Billy Joel’s unbelievable piano skills filled me with joy, awe and wonder. Scott Bradford and I sat close enough to see the blur of his hands as he played all of our favorite songs. Jackson Browne got me in hot water with my Mama the first time I saw him. We had arranged for her and Daddy to pick us up at 10:30PM right outside the Coliseum. I kept looking at my watch, knowing we were going to be late getting there because I simply could not leave before hearing The Load Out and Stay. The joy of hearing those favorites live was almost worth getting grounded!

One of the most joyous moments of my life was when I got my driver’s license on my sixteenth birthday, despite the fact that I would be driving a 1976 Ford Granada. The car was a hand-me-down from my Mama and looked like a mom car, but it got me to high school football games, to Eastland Mall, to Putt-Putt, to Godfather’s Pizza, to my best friend’s house on the Meck Neck (a peninsula of land that jutted out into Lake Norman which required you to drive north into Iredell County, then back south into Mecklenburg County), to Carowinds, and to concerts at the Coliseum. Now, all I had to worry about was making my 11:00PM curfew, which I did, every time. I had a fairly short leash. Mama always had to know where I was going, with whom, and when I could be expected back. I’m pretty sure the neighbors along the route to my friend’s house all knew when Terri and I were heading to her house to spend the night because they could hear AC/DC blasting from my cassette deck as we flew down Brawley School Road! To this day I love to ride with the windows down, the music up, and my lead foot on the gas.

I remember being excited about high school graduation, but what made me truly joyful was the prospect of Senior Week at the Beach! I had to beg … and beg … and beg Mama for permission to go. I was probably the last kid in my class to be granted a yes. I barely remember walking across the stage in the football stadium at North Mecklenburg High School, but I remember everything about that drive to Myrtle Beach. I felt like an adult, heading that far off with a few friends and NO PARENTS! Much about the week wasn’t joyful. No big partier, the noise and rambunctious acts of all the graduates that inundated our hotel, the beach, the Pavilion and the roadways got on my nerves. Some idiot staying above us let a random guy they met on the beach go up to their room to “use the bathroom”. While he was there, he picked up a baseball bat that was in the room for some unknown reason and busted the toilet bowl with it, flooding our third floor room and all the way down to the first floor. We spent the next couple of days with powerful fans drying out our carpet since there was nowhere available to move us. While all the drunken idiots did genius things like pooping in the hotel pool and throwing up in the hallways, my friends and I enjoyed the less populated beach and trips out to eat seafood every night. I have to say it gave me almost as much joy to leave as it did to arrive after seven days of mayhem going on around us.

You’d think as much as I talked about enjoying those times with no parental supervision that I would have been chomping at the bit to leave for college at Appalachian State University. I thought so, too, when I was in high school. When the time came I was filled with more anxiety than joy. There were some joyful times. I made some friends on my hall and in my classes, but I was soooooo homesick that I went home nearly every weekend and transferred to UNCC as soon as the first semester ended. I was elated to head down that mountain, knowing I would only be coming back for visits with those friends. 

I was overjoyed to get engaged to my high school sweetheart just a year after we graduated from high school. I’ll never forget the proposal at Latta Plantation Park or my Mama asking me, “Whose is that?” when I held my hand out to show her my engagement ring. She and my Daddy loved Darryl, but she believed I would never finish college if we got married so young. I was determined to prove her wrong.

Our wedding day was on a beautiful June day. We were twenty years old and thought we were grown adults. I laugh now when I think back to how naive I was about what true adulting would entail. But on that day, I knew it all. The ceremony was a happy and memorable time, but I didn’t feel overjoyed until we were in my Mustang (a replacement for the Granada since my future hubby totaled that car a month before our wedding) heading for the mountains of Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Most of the time since we had started dating when I was sixteen and he was seventeen, Darryl and I had only been allowed to go out one night a week. Always a rule follower, I was home by eleven the night before our wedding. To be out from under all those rules, to do whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted, made me joyful beyond belief!! We still had to call when we got there to say we had arrived safely, but once we got there, we were on our own truly for the first time! I loved every minute of our week in the mountains.

Being newlyweds had its challenges, especially since Darryl was working full time and I was going to school full time, then working almost a full time job. I was helping Dad start a printing business on the side as he still taught Graphic Arts at North Mecklenburg High School. A year and a half after our wedding day, I, joyfully(!), graduated from UNCC with a Bachelor of Arts in English and a minor in Sociology, completed in just three and a half years,. Then, after a week in Florida with Darryl and my parents, I went to work full time in our family printing business. Dad soon quit his teaching job and we were off and running. In a year or so, Darryl joined us and it was truly a family affair.

As life moved on through the sixty years I have now lived and the almost forty years we have been married, there have been some joyful moments: buying our first home; selling our first home; buying our current home; and paying off our current home. We’ve had many joyful trips to beaches from Southwest Florida to Campobello Island in Canada. Two trips to Bar Harbor, Maine were so beautiful and joy-filled that I often say I would love to live there (in the summer months). In Portland, ME a close encounter with a Stealth Bomber as we stood at the iconic Portland Head lighthouse and the thrill of seeing Humpback and Minke whales in the Gulf of Maine near Bar Harbor were thrilling moments that stand out as joyful to me.

One of the most profoundly joyful moments of my life happened when I was present in the delivery room for the birth of my niece, Christina Joan. We had lost my mother, Joan, to a heart attack just shy of her sixty-second birthday only five months earlier. Not so little Christina (10 lbs. plus!!) made her appearance on her mother’s birthday and immediately stole my heart. I had cried buckets of bitter grieving tears over the previous five months since losing my mother. On that day, I cried out of joy! The same elation accompanied the birth of my nephew, Jacob, almost seven years later.

There were many joyful times shared with the Meadows family. From the births of their kids, Megan and AJ, we’ve considered them the closest thing we would ever have to our own children. Thankfully, Beth and Alex did all the heavy lifting and brought up kids of whom we could be more than proud. There were many joyful days on Lake Greenwood, cruising in the pontoon, cheering on the kids as they learned to wakeboard, jet-skiing, catching and eating our dinner, prepared to perfection by chef Alex. The kids many achievements were bright spots. Their intelligence, their talents, and their kindness of heart brightened many days for Darryl and I. Seeing them grow and accomplish their high school graduations, then college graduations, then marriages to well-chosen spouses was thrilling.

There was little to be joyful about for the several years that Covid 19 was a factor in our lives. The pandemic nearly destroyed our business and ravaged our world in a thousand other ways. I felt like I was in a fog, almost the same as the early years of grieving for my mom. 

In September 2023, we were privileged to watch our sweet niece, Michelle, marry her perfect match in Sam. Their wedding was bliss filled! I’d never been to Highlands in extreme Western North Carolina, but it was the perfect backdrop to their ceremony. The love and happiness of that day were the brightest spot I’d been in in a long time. I never felt happier for two people in love. Michelle has been one of the sweetest ingredients in our family and our lives since she arrived. Smart, kind, funny and loving, Michelle chose her profession perfectly. She became a registered nurse. Though we doubted it was possible, after attending her graduation at Gardner-Webb University, we prayed that she would find her equal. The bar was set high. Always one to accomplish her goals, Michelle found Sam. We approved right away as he was smart, friendly, and kind, just like Michelle. He blended into our family like cream into coffee, just making things better. 

Today, on my 60th birthday, our surrogate son, AJ, who has made us incredibly proud as he made his way through medical school at MUSC found out that he was matched at Chapel Hill, NC, where he will complete his residency and become a head and neck surgeon. That doesn’t surprise us. He’s always accomplished every goal he set for himself. His chosen speciality is no surprise either. In 2012 his beloved sister, Megan, who had recently made it through the first round on American Idol and received her golden ticket, was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at only fifteen. ENT specialists saved Megan’s life and she is cancer free to this day, praise God. Leave it to AJ to follow in their footsteps. He will pay it forward with those who find themselves in the same spot his big sister was in back then.

In childhood, my joy sprung from things which gave me a sense of adventure, of breaking out, of freedom. I lived for going fast, for breaking free. Like most kids I got a lot of my happiness from acquisitions … new things that belonged to me, new places I got to see, new experiences.

As I’ve grown older my joy comes from seeing those I care about get the things they need, the things they want, the things they deserve, the things they have earned. Pride is closely tied to joy for me and I could not be prouder of Christina, of Jacob, of Megan, of AJ, of Michelle and Sam. I am truly blessed.