I just noticed that a few posts down I spelled the word “funny” as “fummy.” Now that’s fummy.
Joshua and I were invited to a surprise party for my friend Beth’s 30th birthday. I lived with Beth, her husband Kenny, and their amazing baby, Sara(h) for about five months before I married Joshua. Sarah’s now 4 years old and has lots of hair. The Broom’s moved to Kentucky and back to the Dallas area, had another baby who just turned 2 in September, and are moving to Flower Mound tomorrow. They had the surprise party at their new house.
In the e-mail invitation, Kenny listed his house address as 4909. I google-mapped it, and we showed up at the appropriate time, except that it wasn’t his house. The people who live there, who pulled up while we were parked in front of their house, were looking at as warily, so I got out and asked them if if the Brooms lived there. The owners were surprised to learn that their house belonged to someone else.
They recommended other streets in the neighborhood with the eerily similar names. We drove around to all the like-named streets we could find, but none of the house numbers matched. We even put in a phone call to another possible partygoer with no answer. We were about to give up and decided to give the first street one last try. When we did, we saw people we know obviously on their way to the party. They walked up to a house that wasn’t the right one. They were given the same address we were. At least we were on the same page.
The wonderfully nice people at the second wrong house let us use their computer to try to look up the address again. We told them about how we haven’t seen the Brooms in forever and how we were trying to get to a surprise party. They said, “well we’ve got ice cream and Cokes. We could just have a party here, then.” It was very sweet, as they were a bit of an older couple.
Jon, one of our friends, tried to call our mutual possible partygoer friend and got ahold of her. She gave us Kenny’s number and we called and got ahold of him. Their house was two doors down, number 4904. So we finally made it, and boy was Beth ever surprised to see us.
It was really good to see them. When I first met Kenny, we really butted heads. He was the new college minister at my church when I was in college, and he thought I was heretical. Told me so to my face in a room full of people. He really hurt my feelings when that happened. It hurt because I love Jesus more than anything, and was going through some hard things and was trying to be honest about where I was at. I wasn’t trying to justify it, ot rationalize it away, I was just trying to share what I was going through. I didn’t really like him much shortly afterward.
Kenny didn’t know how much he had hurt my feelings. We’re a lot alike in many ways — and he had just said what he though without thinking of the effect (sound like anyone you know, hmm?). I told him, i think that next Sunday, that he had really hurt me, and explained how I felt and we talked about it for a minute.
Now I’m not going to say on my blog that Kenny Broom cried, but his eyes got red and they did water just ever so slightly. I will say I cried.
We continued to butt heads throughout the rest of my college career and his ensuing tenure as the college minister, but after that initial incident, we had a better understanding of each other. I think one of the reasons we butted heads so much is because we are so much alike (a fact we both vehemently and loudly cried foul about whenever anyone would mention it to either one of us). We are also wildly different, but that’s another blog post. Once Kenny learned I played soccer in high school, he liked me much better. Who knew what it takes? If anyone had told us back then that after a year, we’d be housemates… well, I just don’t know.
Happy Birthday, Beth. We’ll have to get our munchkins together.