Usually on a summer morning, Adella will run and I will walk
and the dogs will wait for us because going back and forth in straight lines
means nothing to them. One day last
week, though, we changed it up and all four of us walked together on the beach.
We were all up early, there was a breeze, and time was ours. Off we went.
Along the way I nodded and said hello to a compulsive trash
collector like myself. She raised her
head and gave me a blank stare and moved on.
Adella made the “Ok….What was that?” face, and I said, “Too much trash on
the beach will do that to you.”
The woman dropped her bag of trash into a barrel and turned
back in our direction. She picked up
some soggy, corrugated cardboard and held it out from her with that, “What am I going to do with this?” gesture. I offered my bag to her so that she could
relieve herself of the junk.
She saw my daughter’s tank top and said, “You go to ECU?”
“Not yet,” I said (I still make the mistake of answering for
Adella as if she were a preschooler.).
“She went there for band camp.”
“How much did you love it?” the lady smiled. “Think you’ll go there?”
Adella has never felt compelled to please the crowd. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Did you go there?” I asked.
“Yes-and-I-loved-it,” she replied. That’s how ECU people are. They gush about their school. They can’t wait to tell you they loved
it. She studied elementary education and
she loved it. She retired from teaching and has been cleaning the beach every morning
for the past 16 years.
ECU people commit to stuff. They care about being a part of
things. They are loyal to whatever they
believe is worth doing, and they do it.
Back at band camp, I sat next to a woman who was an alum who
married her college sweetheart, who was also an alum. They loved ECU so much, they settled in
Greenville, where there is nothing but vegetables and single-wides with TV
antennae (yes, antennae; the memo has not gotten to Greenville yet, and they
are still watching TV with their antennae), gas stations, and a few churches.
At the band camp concert, we heard about a lot of couples
who met at ECU and went on to marry and become music teachers together.
The school has something.
Despite my daughter’s not exactly crowd-pleasing response to
the ECU questions, the ECU alum who is a retired teacher caught up with us a
little later to tell us the current drum major at ECU is from here, Topsail
Beach.
North Carolina is an amazing place for stirring in so many
people a loyalty to place. I see it and
feel it whenever we are here: people
care about you, and they’re not about to walk away. It’s an attitude that brings me back to the
young man who towed my car to the garage a few weeks ago. Look what’s here.
That an elderly woman who works so hard to protect the
integrity of the beach would also go out of her way to connect with my daughter
and assure her that ECU is worthwhile because it is connected to people who are
here….Well, that’s everything. That’s
the loyalty born of passion that makes everything possible. That’s North Carolina telling my daughter
it’ll care back if she cares for it.
Talk about making things easy.
4 Comments
wonderfully written, sandy. now i'm hoping adella will chose ecu! :)
ReplyDeleteI love your passion in this post, Sandy, and the description of ECU sounds magnificent. I'd love to just troll around there now after reading this!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the scene so well written I taste the salt
ReplyDeleteALOHA from Honolulu
ComfortSpiral
=^..^= . <3 . >< } } (°>
Well by gum, sounds like ECU is worth thinking about.
ReplyDeleteThanks for being here.