Lindy.
She was brainy and beautiful and blonde and thoughtful and introspective and funny and principled and unlike any woman I’d ever met. And she attended that campus church where I’d formed Phoenix.
Lindy was a free spirit, less bound by religious protocol than any of our peers in that church. Her idea of worship was more along the lines of sitting in her backyard in the shade of a tree, sipping hot tea, watching birds at play than singing praise choruses to the folksy roar of acoustic guitars.
She wasn’t really a joiner, though she was as friendly as could be. She existed on the fringes of this campus crowd, happy to hang out but feeling no need to be at the center of anything. Not surprisingly, this drew me to her; we hung out a lot, and I looked forward to time spent with her.
She encouraged my songwriting, and was herself given to snippets of poetry. When she presented one to me – one she’d written about me, comparing me to a tree in a lovely and creative way – I was incredibly moved.
She was also a very gifted artist, though I really experienced this side of her much later – and while I loved the outdoors, she just put me to shame as a hiker, traveler, and aficionado of nature.
(As a side note, Lindy also played in the UK orchestra, coincidentally sitting next to my FCHS classmate Eunice. I mention it here only because it will be important later...)
Lindy carried a private pain of which she never spoke, and which I never fully understood. This, too, drew me to her, as I carried a bit of that sort of pain myself. I think she was aware that I was aware of it, and that was more than enough.
I remember when the fall semester ended in 1980, and I drove her to the airfield in Lexington to fly home for the holidays. Two weeks later, I picked her up on her return flight. Again, I was there on the edge of that private space of hers; she didn’t say much about her time away, but there was a sense of refuge we shared in each other’s presence.
I could feel, but couldn’t voice, a connection with Lindy that felt far bigger than anything I’d ever experienced. It was easy to imagine our friendship becoming something more. But even though we were connected through an Evangelical church and had Evangelical friends in common, she was clearly not an Evangelical; she was part of something grander, and somehow given to more and greater mystery.
That frightened me a little. Bad enough, growing up Fundamentalist, not learning how to actually live in the real world; worse still, with ADD hanging around my neck like the Kryptonite necklace Christopher Reeve wore in the first Superman. I didn’t act on whatever I was feeling for Lindy.
And so we simply remained friends. When my car went on the fritz a few months later, she loaned me the money to get it fixed, and was supremely patient over the two years it took me to pay her back.
And then she vanished into the Eighties...
The connection between me and Lindy foreshadowed my emergence from the prison of ADD decades later, with all that I would eventually understand about how my differences truly impacted those who loved me.7 I would learn more from her, and from our deep friendship, than I would learn from anyone else in the years that passed before the Internet restored our connection, so many years on.
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