The Change is Within ME

I didn’t sleep so good last night. Maybe it was the rare afternoon “iced venti half-caff Café Americano with a pump of sugar free hazelnut syrup - extra ice” after a busy day in the outdoor heat with 700+ 1st graders at a water safety event with a 5pm board meeting as a chaser. Maybe it’s just my age and hormones. Maybe it’s the ugliness of a missing Tucson child, one that was snatched in the middle of the night from her bed. A six-year old girl who not only is a child of my Tucson community but a member of the Tucson Medical Center family. You see this beautiful baby’s mother works at my hospital and her father used to. So many people at TMC know little Isa. Whatever the cause, two hours of sleep and an hour and a half of lying in bed wide awake, I rose just after 3am and decided I needed to do something to make a change. Even if that change is small and only within me, it’s something I need to strive for. I’ve been feeling a little negative lately and it’s not who I’ve always been. Did I really change that much after Al died that I’m not so much the glass half full girl anymore? So there I was standing in my bathroom blow-drying my freshly washed hair at 3:30am when it hit me. I need to do at least one positive thing each and every day. I need to stop letting life happen to me and weighing me down. And I knew just how to jumpstart this journey. I got in my car, drove to Wal-Mart and picked up six different muffin mixes and went back home. Actually, I wandered the aisles at Wal-Mart just a little bit with my camera in my purse hoping to catch one of those awesome People of Wal-Mart shots but I think it was just me, some East Indian dude and a Goth looking couple in the whole place. Damn. Anyway…. I went home, made all the muffins, packaged them up and put them in a Trader Joe’s paper sack along with a new tub of “buttery” spread and a package of disposable knives. Finished getting ready for work, fed the dogs and headed across town.

There was no one there when I arrived. The media trucks and reporters were busy enough in their designated area but the command post was empty.

I suppose volunteers need to sleep too. I left my Trader Joe’s bag full of deliciousness on a chair with a little note for the volunteers to enjoy the contents and left my name and place of employment. (Didn’t want them to think some crazy left the bag and the muffins were poisoned! And to be honest my name is pretty well known to many of the TMC employee volunteers who man the command center so I felt that by leaving my name, there was a better chance of them actually eating the muffins rather than tossing the whole bag.) Walking back to my car I was stopped by a kind-hearted, bearded lady (Seriously! She had a few days worth of stubble going) who wanted to make a donation. She held out a $1 bill and asked me to take it. With no one around to take her donation, I explained that I worked at TMC where the only designated fund to help find Isa resides in our foundation. Poor thing talked a good 10 minutes about her career and life in Los Angeles and how she ended up in Tucson. I have to admit, I did enjoy watching her stubble filled chin move all around as she spoke. That’s not negative, right? She left with a warm feeling too. Just like me. And then it was off to start another busy day.