NEVER SURRENDER!

Elana Johnson:
http://elanajohnson.blogspot.com/2012/05/never-surrender-blogfest.html?utm_source=feedburner


is having a blogfest, NEVER SURRENDER, to coincide with the 2nd week of her new book, SURRENDER.

http://www.amazon.com/Surrender-Elana-Johnson/dp/1442445688


All you have to do is blog about a time you didn't surrender.


What did that church sign read I passed last week?
There can be no testimony without first the test.


Don't expect any bugles blowing, heavenly choirs singing in the blood-red skies as I charged up the hill.


Hear that?


It is the sound of a grown man crying. 


Me. 

Four days earlier, my home had burned to the ground.  Pebbles, my cat, awakened me by, for the first ever,

 scratching my cheek.  I awoke to a carpet of flames above my head rolling across the ceiling.


I lost sight of Pebbles.  I crawled on the smoke-choked floor, down the hall where I found my Norwegian Elk Hound, Hercules, collapsed as he had tried to reach me.


I dragged his 100 pounds across the burning floors of the hallway and the front room, flames searing my fingers and face.


Hercules died from seizures and a heart attack.  My home burned to the ground. All the pictures of my dead finacee, mother, my childhood best friend ... burned.


And then, there was Shadow,


the abused Chow, I took in from being abandoned on the street by the next door neighbor, who in trying to make him mean had only managed to break his spirit.


Hence the name, Shadow, for he would dog my steps in my fenced-in backyard, but he would never let me touch him.  I got out of the hospital with 2nd and 3rd degrees burns on my face and hands to find him dead from poison.


I finally got to stroke his soft fur as I sobbed.


I walked into the burned ruins of my childhood home.  I walked down the hall to my bedroom, looking to see if Pebbles had escaped the fire and was back.


I had a sick thought.  I kneeled on the floor.  Pebbles.  She had crawled under my bed in fear.  Her face ....


I will not punish you with the details.  You are writers.  You know what I saw.


I fell on my butt and wept.  Something round gouged my rump.  I dug it out.  A bottle of the heart medication I had kept for my mother's rapid heartbeats.  One would slow down her heart enough to breathe.


I counted the pills.  120.  That should slow even my heart down enough to sleep the last sleep.


Kathleen, who asked me to marry her, was dead two years back. 

My childhood best friend, Tommy

(last of the LEAGUE OF FIVE) had died Christmas morning, crushed under the dash of his 18 wheeler. 

The wreck had happened at midnight.  He was still barely alive when the ambulance came at dawn. 

He suffered alone for hours.  He died without knowing help had come. 

Mother had died the year before. 

My business died that year.

I was now penniless and homeless.

I opened the bottle. 

I jumped a whole foot it seemed, spilling pills all over the charred floor as my cell phone on my belt wailed.


Sandra Thrasher, my best friend.  Her voice spoke to me from the cell phone.


"Roland, I had the strongest sense of you just now.  You were planning something stupid, weren't you?"


"You know me," I tried to laugh.  "Stupid is a natural talent."


"No, it's not.  And there's something else you're not:

a quitter.  Oh, you bitch, whine, and moan.  But over the years, I've seen you take shots that would take out John Wayne.  You've got balls of steel, Roland."


I fought a sob.  "They're melted right now."


"Of course they are.  But you've got something else, too."


"What's that?"


"Me, you moron! 

And if you think I am going to let you leave me alone to face my moaning, bitching family who won't listen to my own bitching and whining without getting threatened, well ...


You got another thing coming.  Hell, I might turn all godly just so when I die, I can kick your butt from here to doomsday for leaving me!  You hear me!"


I smiled weakly.  "Even without the cell phone, I think I would hear you, Sandra."


I got up, crushing the pills under my boots slowly each and every one.  "Thanks, Sandra."


"Hell, you did it for me when my mother died, when I got breast cancer.  It's what friends do."

WHAT FRIENDS DO.

That is why I wrote this post.  Not to wail.  Everyone you pass is having a harder time than they appear.

THEN WHY?

So that next time a person comes strongly to mind ... Do not ignore it.  Be a Sandra Thrasher.  Call them.  Be the friend that all of us needs at one time or another.

Remember this post ... and call them.