That’s what she called him, “Lumpy.”

For the two or three people in the whole world who might understand what I’m talking about, that’s what yet another Maryland friend emailed me when I told her who had died on Wednesday. I didn’t even know he had a nickname, but then she might have gone to high school with him, and of course I didn’t, having moved there back in ‘75. Lumpy? I knew him as Jay.

The news is part of a larger medicine show. It’s strange, the effect it’s all having on me… as if I’m actually a member of the human race. A long time coming too, because growing up an Air Force brat with over 40 changes of residence when I was a kid is like being cast in iron. During my school years, I never had a friend for more than a few months at a time, so I guess I never really knew what other folks considered normal. I always had to just let everybody go.

For the last nine years in Taos, I’ve had to look at every unpatched hole and all the scary monsters. It’s taken me all this time to stop walking around with the old landscapes in my head, too. It was as if the past might grab me if I weren’t careful, pull me back and mangle my soul. I haven’t exactly been pining for old scenes of late, but there was always this self-doubting incompleteness that made me wonder. Guilt, actually, I realize.

Hearing about Lumpy is part of what makes me feel connected today, and yet that also frees me. I didn’t expect that! It’s as if acknowledging my past also means I don’t “have” to go back. I feel a circle’s been completed, like everything’s OK, like I just gave myself permission to truly get on with living where I am.

Can you believe it took nine years?