Decennial

[1]

On a 2011 walk through Sacramento’s Capitol Park with Nicole Francine (Renaud) McGlashen, a resplendent pink flower stopped me in my tracks. After admiring it, a thought occurred to me: no one had to tell me of its brilliance. No special knowledge or training was required of me. I was, somehow, prewired to know it was beautiful.

Nicole McGlashen is a very serious person. She’s a highly-educated, seminary-trained, ordained pastor — all of which you may not know because she hasn’t told you. As I learned the day we met, it takes more than a resume to impress her. “Hey Nicole, I want to introduce you to my friend Collin,” said my friend, Bill. “He’s our Assemblyman’s Chief of Staff.” Without expression or word, she turned her head toward me. After turning quickly back to Bill, she said, “OK.”

But she doesn’t take herself too seriously. She laughs the hardest when she’s being made fun of. And when that happens, watch out. Her arms involuntarily join-in with the celebration and swing for the shoulders of the person who started the party.

Speaking of parties, it’s always obvious when she’s ready to leave one. She can’t hide it, and she doesn’t attempt to do so: “Ok, I think I’m ready to go now.”

She’s also a terrible liar.  Watering eyes, stumbling speech, and a rapid crimsoning of her face gives away even the most light-hearted attempt to deceive like one of those spinning red beacon lights alerting you to an intruder. She’s so constitutionally incapable of lying, in fact, that you have no choice but to give her the benefit of the doubt even when she tells you something that would immediately be deemed absurd if spoken by anyone else. For example:

Nicole: You were in my dream last night...

Collin: Oh. OK. 

Nicole: ...Well, I mean, it was you, it was just that you looked exactly like Hugh Jackman.

True story.

All of this comes from the same place. With Nicole, everything is about what is true: “Can we just get real?”, “Look, I’m just going to be honest with you...”, “I have to say this.”, “At the end of the day, we’re all going to die.”

Oh, did that last one startle you?

After becoming all-too-well-acquainted with death in 2020, Nicole discovered, and was magnetically drawn to, “memento mori” (Latin for “remember your death”), which is the intentional practice of keeping the inevitability of our eventual demise front-and-center, usually in the form of a desktop skull or something like it.

I realize that may seem morbid at first. But the real point of focusing on death is life.

She is fiercely committed to what is true and essential, and Eleanor, Virginia, Yale, and I are the beneficiaries. She listens intently and empathetically to our first-grade or 37-year-old-professional troubles. She gives us rest. She gives us life. “Life” often comes in the form of her popular wall-shaking operatic renditions of “Walk the Dinosaur,” today’s chart-topper, or songs of her own authorship such as: “YAY-el! Bebby-boy! Cutest boy in the WUH-uhrld!”  (There’s an entire library.) 

Her life gives life to us, to those she teaches, and even to a friend-of-a-friend of mine who Nicole has never even met but wanted to check-in on because she knew they were sick.

It’s hard for me, at times, to accept that there are some things in this life —maybe a lot more than I’d like to admit — that I simply didn’t earn. 

There she is. No one needs to tell me of her brilliance. I’m prewired to know she’s beautiful. All that is required of me is to look and see.

Happy Anniversary.

November 13, 2020

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[1] Saint Jerome Writing By Caravaggio - Self-scanned, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15219558