Goodnight Hollywood Blvd

The house where I grew up is on the market. I don't know why, but that makes me a little sad. The new owners destroyed my favorite thing about this house: the beautiful maple tree in the front that I used to climb waiting on my dad to get home from work.

Before it belonged to my parents, this house belonged to my grandparents. When we first moved to Birmingham we lived there with them, and Burt and I shared a room. I can still remember him keeping me up all hours of the night with his endless chatter. He always was a nightowl.

I spent the day with my dad. I love my dad so much. I hate seeing how absolutely tired he is at only 53. As John Coffey, the healer from The Green Mile would say, he's "dog tired". Listening to him talk about his mother reminded me that we are all suffering from one end of the pendulum swing or the other, that balance is the greatest quest and I seriously doubt any of us will every find it. But we sure as hell can try. The stories he has shared with me over the past year have made everything clear to me: why he was always so passive with my mom, how he would run away from fights and ignored all the red flags when things were so bad. My heart wells up in sadness for him knowing the travails he has been through and seeing how they have made him lean so far to the side of avoiding confrontation at all cost. I don't justify these things, but I have so much more understanding and compassion for him than I did not so very long ago. He's no longer the hard, prideful, overbearing man that he once was. Now I see him as he really is: a broken man in need of some grace.


My brother called and apologized to me after almost a year of not speaking to me. Out of the blue he called me up and left me a message to call him back. Tears welled up in my eyes when I saw his number on my phone. I called him back and before he could get a word in I said, "The last time we spoke I told you I didn't want to speak to you until you were ready to apologize. Are you calling to apologize?"

It was quiet for moment, and then there was a quiet "yes" on the other end.

"Then what you need to do is hang up the phone, call Clint and tell him that you're sorry because what you did didn't just hurt me, it hurt him too."

And he did it. He called Clint and said he was sorry.

I can't tell you how many nights I would fall into Clint's arms and weep because I really believed I never would get that call. I was so convinced that it meant more to him to be right than to have me in his life. And then it happened.

And now? It's like nothing ever happened. And for that I am so, so thankful.

Today, even though I am completely apathetic towards God and Jesus: I am so very very thankful for my crazy, fucked up family.