an evening with samantha

This evening the kids and I drove up to Winthrop to try and provide a friend with a connection to something familiar. How is it that one can experience a huge, exceedingly exciting change in one's life and still experience a concurrent loneliness? I've noticed in my own life, loneliness can be caused by just such excitement, by that feeling of having so much new wonderfulness in your life and not having anyone familiar around to share it with.
So I'm not saying that my friend was experiencing loneliness, or that if she was, tonight's excursion helped at all. I'm just remembering similar circumstances of my own that have brought on loneliness, and guessing that two weeks out, its time to have familiar faces in physical presence to stand in the middle of your excitement and be excited with you. So we drove to Winthrop, picked her up and headed to Charlotte's South Park Mall for some Cheesecake Factory. There were 73,000 people at Cheesecake Factory and the wait for dinner was something like 14 years. I decided we wouldn't make it home in time to send my own kids to college, so we got back in the car and drove up the road a little and ate with a bunch of old people at Ruby Tuesday instead of the hipster Cheesecake consumers. You know the Ruby Tuesday, the one across the parking lot from a certain bookstore that stays open later than Starbucks, and whose name is referenced just below the title of my blog. I had the New Orleans Seafood, blackened Tilapia topped with shrimp and Alfredo sauce with steamed broccoli and rice, and a couple hours of news about classes, buildings, new friends, meals, schedules, etc..
After dinner we walked over to Starbucks for coffee. The kids stood in front of the security camera in a line tallest to shortest and watched themselves in the monitor doing arm tricks behind Jack.
After dropping her off at her dorm we headed back down I-77 and the kids fell fast asleep. I began thinking about life's stages, about the steps we take toward independence. I decided that we really just move toward responsibility – we are always dependent. Here I am, 22 years away from home. I've got a beautiful wife, three crazy kids, a mortgage, a truck to drive me to Charlotte, and a few bucks to buy dinner for a friend. I grow increasingly dependent on my wife and kids, but dependence on my parents never diminishes. Sure I need them for entirely different reasons than I did - to share exciting moments, receive wise, experienced advice. How wise of God to implant a need in us to share the new stuff with the familiar. How wise that our community grows rather than changes. How gracious that God gave us cell phones. I'm thankful that Dad was still up at 10:30 on a Saturday night.