Giggly Goes Bye Bye.

This post is all about my pal Giggly. She’s moving to Anchorage, Alaska for a job. At her going away party last night, I wrote that I would do a blog entry in honor of her, since to recap all my fond memories of her would take up way too many pages in the guestbook (and plus I’d spend all of the party time writing, instead of DRINKING!)

Giggly is one of those rare rare women: stunningly beautiful with none of the pretense or affectedness that comes with beautiful women. And she’s totally hard core. Looking at her, one might think that she’s too much of a girly girl to want to get suited up in Katrina Country to do gut outs of houses. But she didn’t flinch once. She didn’t bolt at the sight of cockroaches, she didn’t complain at her leaking air mattress in the gym where we stayed for the week, she didn’t faint at hefting shovelful after shovelful of debris to the curb, and she mowed a yard where the grass came up to her waist in 90 degree heat.

So here ya go, a random sampling of some of my favorites memories of Giggly.

I first met Giggly at the church retreat last year. It was during lunch on a Saturday, and after lunch we had our choice of four different talks to go to. My particular lunch table was buzzing about the talk entitled “The Christian Case for Sex: A Holistic View of The Body.” In order to get to that talk, you had to cross a meadow in full view of everyone else that were going to the talks on Paul the Apostle, or International Justice. It inadvertently turned into a kind of Walk Of Shame, like look at the people who wanna hear about SEX! Oooooohhhhhh!

Because I have no shame, I was all set to stride across the meadow, and I noticed Giggly was doing the Indecisive Dance, where she WANTED to go, but she didn’t wanna take that walk by herself. So I gaily slung an arm around her shoulders, and pulled her along with me, bellowing at the top of my lungs as we went that “(Giggly) wants to talk about SEX!!!” She started laughing, we made it across the meadow, learned all about culture viewpoints on sex versus Christian viewpoints on sex (you can imagine what the answers are) and Giggly later thanked me for making her go.

A few months later, I had made the decision (on an empty stomach) to go on my church’s Katrina Mission Trip. I was sitting in the back of the church, filling out the paperwork, when I noticed Giggly sitting beside me, filling out the same paperwork. “You’re going to Katrina?” I asked her, and she said yes indeedy she was. Instantly, I knew going on this trip was going to be exactly the right thing to do. It’s very rare to feel that kind of concrete feeling based on so little information, but something just told me that if fun people like Giggly were going to be going on this trip, that this was going to be a very special trip indeed, and it was even before we knew that Native Chick would be joining us, which made the trip that much more awesome.

Incidentally, Giggly is the only person who’s ever told me that my handwriting is pretty. Everyone else thinks it looks like the scribblings of a serial killer. Not that it’s influencing my opinion of her AT ALL, ha ha ha.

The whirlwind trip of Katrina Country, which I’ve already blogged about in greater detail elsewhere. I was mentioning to my buddy Xavier last night that the Katrina trip was very much like everything I’ve heard about childbirth, in which you look back on it with great fondness, to the point that you’d want to do it again, conveniently forgetting all the parts of physical pain and exhaustion that SUCKED ASS. But the one morning at the very end of the trip found my crew splitting up and wandering around the French Quarter at 9am in the morning. Giggly and I paired off and wandered around for hours, taking pictures until my digital camera died, talking about life, boys, job aspirations, boys, feelings on religion, boys that aggravate us, boys we wish were smarter, boys we wish we were smarter about. We ended up sitting on a stoop towards the east end of the Quarter, waiting for Native Chick to show up with the car, and it really did feel like we had known each other for forever.

Getting back from Katrina Country, Giggly, Native Chick and myself all signed up for the same Small Group. Our Small Group usually closes our meetings with a group prayer, and people will say what they need prayer about, and then we all take turns praying about it. I usually don’t voice any prayer requests, simply because people have more pressing problems than I do, and I don’t ever think my circumstances are so dire as to do an all call prayer for it, and I get irrationally skeeved out hearing people pray for me. But every now and then Giggly would pray out loud for me, skeeviness be damned, “I know Amy hasn’t said anything, Lord, but I know there are things going on in her life that she needs Your help with.” And I secretly appreciated it.

I haven’t even mentioned the times we went for cocktails, or the times in church where we’d stand together and sing, or how she participated in a full baptismal born again dunking in front of the church. But I will close with this:

At our Small Group last week, we closed in prayer for Giggly. She sat in the middle of the group and we all laid hands on her as we prayed. I’m not a big fan of the laying on of hands in prayer, it kinda conjures up an Oooky Gooky Spooky Communing With The Woo Woo Spirits Feeling for me. But I gamely joined in, because it’s not about me, it’s about Giggly. I had one hand on her shoe, and one pinky wrapped tight around hers. (there were a lot of people there, so you had to fight for space.) And though it seems strange, I think it’s gonna be the tightness of that pinky hold that I’ll remember the most. For the rare woman whose heart really is that pure, that big, that loving, that caring. For the woman whose spirit is as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside. For the woman who wielded a mean wheelbarrow full of toxic debris, who wandered into the French Quarter Fire Station in search of hot firemen with me, who loves little kids (who love her right back), who split a piece of the most divinely rich cake with white chocolate icing at the Alcove with me, for the woman who never stops believing in the possibilities of what God can do, including untangling a wreck of a love life (hers, mine, everybody’s.) God’s going to do some amazing things with Giggly and I can’t wait to see what happens next.