ShareThisOn a flight from Las Vegas to Sacramento, Calif., while my husband got lost in a book, I sucked on the ice from my Diet Pepsi and tried to estimate the capacity of the average human heart.
How much can it hold? How far will it stretch? How many times can it break and mend?
Since moving three years ago to Las Vegas, we've made countless trips back to California to see family and friends we left behind.
We were married barely a year before the move, and were still trying to merge lives and address books and Christmas lists. It was a major merger.
We knew when we moved it wouldn't be easy to stay in touch; it isn't easy if you live five blocks apart, let alone 500 miles. But it seemed like the right decision, and we've seen no reason to second-guess it.
Still, it's hard to feel close from afar, especially if a loved one is ill. So we were going to see my husband's parents. His dad was soon to be released from the hospital, and we were hoping we could be helpful, or at least, not get in the way.
Sometimes the best you can do is just show up and be there.
I looked around the cabin of the plane and wondered who else was going somewhere just to show up and be there.
Lately I'd been wanting to "show up and be there" in all sorts of places -- with my husband's parents; with his sister and her family; with our collective grown children and their "others"; with my family in the South; and with all the friends I long to see, the laughter I long to hear, the necks I long to hug.
It's enough to make you wonder: How many loves can one heart hold? How many saints can one sinner pray for? How many phone calls and texts and e-mails and other exchanges can a hopelessly e-challenged woman do?
My grandmother bore 12 children; 10 survived to give her 25 grandchildren. I don't know how she did it. I suspect she never knew all our names.
That thought made me laugh out loud. My husband looked up from his book. He gets wary when I am privately amused.
The flight landed and we took a shuttle to get a rental car. The shuttle driver was Helen Banks.
"How are you?" I said.
"I'm mean," she replied. I figured we were in for quite a ride. In 10 quick minutes, she told us her story. Goes like this.
Helen Banks has 24 children (number 24 is due any day.) Two are biological, six are stepchildren; all the others, she said, were adopted from drug-addicted mothers.
"I don't do foster care. I only do adoption." And there's no shortage, she said, of babies in need of homes.
"You want me to get some for you?" she asked. I laughed, but she wasn't joking.
She showed us a photo of her youngest, Jonathan, who is 2 years old, so shamelessly cute it hurt my eyes to look at him.
Most of her 24 are grown now, giving her 30 (or is it 32?) grandchildren. Christmas in her living room is like New Year's Eve in Times Square.
"I have to be mean," she said, giving me a look, and I nodded in total agreement.
Then she pulled up to the curb and sent us on our way. I wanted to ask how she does it. How does she open her heart, let alone her freezer, to all those needy souls? How can she "show up and be there" in so many lives all at once?
I don't know, but I can guess. The heart is a muscle. You use it or lose it. The more you use it, the more it holds. We can't be everywhere we want to be. But love? It knows no bounds.
(Contact Sharon Randall at P.O. Box 777394, Henderson, NV 89077; or at www.sharonrandall.com.)
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