MIA

"Are you okay?"

The question was so immediate to my picking up the phone that it took me off guard. "Yeah. I just got home from work . . . ."

"I was worried . . . ."

I had talked to my friend, Jill, last night. Austin and Kolya had invited me to their band's first concert. (When Cypress Road takes off, I get to say that I knew them when . . . .) I had to work at the book store and Jill invited me to come for dinner right after and stay for their concert. But apparently all of my synapses weren't firing and both things slipped my mind.

We all have emotional traps we fall into. One of mine is that if I went MIA (missing in action) that it would take forever for people to notice. Aside from work, there is no one that I interact with on a daily basis. And then there are the weekends. If I'm not scheduled at the Barnes and Noble, then there in nowhere I have to be. While people might notice at church, it might take a few times of missing for there to be a response. There are a multitude of benign (vacation, out of town, etc) reasons for someone to miss.

I got off work at 6:00 and that would have put me at Jill's by 6:15 or so. Thanks to her call, I made it to the 7:30 premier. While I don't want to make a habit of missing things, her timely response and care touched me. I told her as I was leaving, "That blows my it-would-take-forever-for-someone-to-miss-me theory out of the water!" Perhaps it is silly, but it felt nice.