I DON’T KNOW MUCH about geometry, but Margaret sees the metaphor of math in life. She was much quicker than I in seeing how sisterhoods are sets and subsets, as well as how varying pods of women gracefully flow into our lives and then ebb away when a shared goal is reached. She is also more patient. Me, I’m always in a rock fight with someone—however metaphorical—and the only math I seem to do is keeping score of who did what to whom. I’m unwilling to see things in the tidy terms of pie, flow and bar charts, but it’s unclear if I come by my outlook via nature or nurture since I am a redhead. Which, Margaret points out, is a sisterhood of its own: the Sisterhood of Red Hair.
You’d think I would have thought of it myself: I wrote a whole book on the topic not long ago. But I needed Margaret’s reminder about this bigger sisterhood of mine.
This is not to say that redheads aren’t friendly and don’t make new friends, or that we don’t appreciate it when we do. We do. In fact, just the other day I made a new friend.
As our voices blended into one maniacal incantation that our daughters make toast out of the other team, that delicious feeling swept over me, that glorious combo of connection, wonder and gratitude.
If there is a more glorious place than the bleachers on a Saturday morning, watching Middle School girls play basketball, I’m not ready to go there, too content am I up in the top row, clutching a steaming cup of tea, scorching myself with its contents every time I throw myself into the air when my daughter’s team merely takes possession of the ball. So attuned to the game was I last week that I barely noticed when a woman I only know as someone’s mother, plunked down next to me and began screaming right along.
We nodded at one another, and as our voices blended into one maniacal incantation that our daughters make toast out of the other team, that delicious feeling swept over me, that glorious combo of connection, wonder and gratitude for which probably the Chinese have eight words but we mere English-speakers have none. I had a new friend. By 11 AM I had no voice left and neither did she, making her near-whisper of what she then told me not one of confession, but rather of necessity.
“Got thrown out of a game recently,” she rasped.
Whatever the reason, I didn’t care, instantly knowing that she was now in my subset, my tribe, one of us. Redheads are very loyal, though no one seems to know this.
It seems that there was an ill-timed lull in the cheering last fall during her daughter’s soccer game. My new friend hadn’t meant to be heard by anyone other than the woman then sitting with her, so it wasn’t one of those awful parents-screaming-at-the-ref moments. Not at all. Trying merely to agree with views previously expressed by her bleacher mate, my new friend was only conceding that yes, the ref was, in fact, not a bit metaphorically, but literally, a bodily part from which we evacuate.
And in the nano-second before she said what she said, the crowd had hushed, the quiet allowing her comment to wash over the benches, the players, the nicely-cropped field and right into the ref’s ears, prompting him to say, “Whoever said that has to leave right now.”
And so my new friend had to walk the walk of shame, out into the parking lot, to sit out the rest of the game in her car.
Did I say earlier that I am not all that patient, or forgiving? I beg to differ, though I would fight to the death that it’s not because redheads are fickle, argumentative and generally as hot-tempered as some people seem to believe. I can change my mind as easily as I can forgive my new friend. And not merely because she, too, is a redhead, though she is, making her a member of subset of sisterhood even I can spot a mile away.
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