Jack-ed Up Phone

I was planning to write yet another post about my "Jack-ed Up" cellphone and title it "Jack's Thrift Store Playlist," because a few weeks ago, inside my purse at the thrift store, the phone started playing music again. I just let it go and kept track of the songs as they played in random order. This is music my husband put on my phone when I got it last year, but I do not listen to because to me my phone is...a phone.

This is what I heard in the thrift store:
1. Nobody Loves Me Like You
2. The Solace of You
3. We Live
4. Don’t You Know I’ve Always Loved You
5. Good Thing
6. Life is a Highway
7. Just the Way I Am
8. Let us Pray
9. Angel’s Heap
10. Don’t Stop Believing
11. Fields of Grace
12. This Day
13. Baba O’Reilly
14. Come Monday
15. Rock the Casbah
16. The Lost Get Found
17. All Star

I searched for meaning in the songs as I wandered the aisles of a place that once provided me with so much pleasure, but now felt empty and annoying. Many meant something to me, especially "Nobody Knows Me Like You," "Don't You Know I've Always Loved You?" and "Just the Way I Am." These songs are about God, but I imagined them as a conversation with Jack.

I laughed when I got to Angel's Heap because the title sounded so spiritual at first, but I think it's about having sex in a car. I turned the music off after the 17th song because, well, should I have just let it go until my battery died? What if only the first few songs meant anything, if any of them meant anything at all?

Anyway, this past Friday morning I walked down to the Bridge for only the second time since the accident. It's just too hard seeing how very, very far the bridge where they found Jack is from where he fell in the water in our neighborhood. I mean really, really far. It's too outrageous seeing a mere trickle of water, even after days of rain, in the shitty little creek bed, yet to know that on that one horrible night it was a raging wall of water that reached over the banks, the bridge, the road.

I took a picture of the cross that friends erected on the roadside. I wanted it for myself, and to share with you on the "Jack's Thrift Store Playlist" post.

So that night, on our way to pack shoe boxes in Jack's memory for Operation Christmas Child, Tim, Margaret and I ducked into a pizza place to get Margaret a slice. It was loud and crowded. I felt trapped. I was angry at all the families having a care-free Friday night.

I went to stand outside on the stoop and heard music coming from my coat pocket. Again? It was one of the very songs that had popped up in the thrift shop weeks earlier.

Which one? Check it out. Believe me, it's worth it.