Love: Still the Biggest Thrill

       

    
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EjcwIVL3s8
  


         I love Katt Williams, the comedian.  He says, in so many words, you've got to take care of the star player, and you are the star player.  Managing to take care of body and soul has its own thrills, but it's not enough.  Love is still the biggest thrill.
     
      Here's another one of my guiding philosophies:  "If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy."  And by "Mama" I mean me.   I don't make everyone around me miserable if I happen to be in a bad place.  If anything, I'm more inclined to hibernate and hide out while I work through the blues.  
    
      But keeping my own self happy is a big priority.
    
       That means my own wishes and whims come first, mostly. 
      
       It means I come and go when I want, spend how I want, vote how I want, eat what I want, sleep when I want, think what I want and work the way I want. It's not accidental; I've spent a long time crafting it to be just this way.

        It's a good life in a beautiful paradise of a city, but all alone it feels empty. Even if work is going well, everyone is healthy at home, and the world is clicking away on its axis in mostly predictable ways, unless I reach out for love, to give it and get it, there's something off.  I can feel it like a sunburn that's too far under the skin to soothe.

        So my biggest thrill is love.  That's it.  Love for all of it: family, my sisters, my friends, the Grove, the critters, small kids  at the library where I work and this whole astounding gift of a life. 
   

Rayette

          When I was a little girl, I fell in love with Rayette on the parade grounds at a war college in Norfolk, Virginia.  My dad was  at the school and we lived on the army base.  She lived there, too, but she was older by two years and my big sister knew her from school.

One day I was running around barefoot through the grass and I stepped on a yellow jacket bee.  It was like fire, and sudden, and I started screaming.  Rayette swooped down from out of nowhere, dried up my tears and carried me across the neighborhood like a baby, all the way to my door.

I fell for her right then.  She had a thick french braid of long blonde hair and her wrist, right where it met her hand, was thick, too, which I really liked.  I told her I could read her palm so I could hold her hand the next day, and she laughed while I pretended and gave goofy answers like a fortune teller.

The day after that I made a picture for her in first grade.  It was a horse because she reminded me of a cowgirl for some reason.  I was big on cowgirls at age 7.  I started following her all over the place and hanging around where she would be at the park and before long she invited me over to her house.

I threw down my school stuff and said, "Mom, I'm going to my friend's."
But it was Dad at the dinette set, not Mom.
"Whose house?  What friend?" he barked.
"Just my friend, Rayette."
"Naw, you aren't going over to that sergent's house."
"Dad?! Why?"
"You got no business over there."

And that was the end of my budding love affair with Rayette.