Member-only story
She Couldn’t Give Blood
And That Opened My Wound
My friend Laura stopped by last Saturday to pick up a painting I was giving to her. It was just an abstract acrylic, a thing I had picked up by way of the Facebook Give/Ask page in our neighborhood, and was paying forward the same way. She’d said she liked it because it reminded her of the cover art on Untamed by Glennon Doyle. I was happy enough to give her the painting. I didn’t really have a place for it here, and if it would bring her some happiness, that was great.
Laura and I met a few months after I moved to Baltimore, by way of a local running group I attend from time to time called The November Project. Full disclosure, I should go more often because those people are great.
When she stopped by to pick up the painting, Laura was returning home after having been turned away by the Red Cross. She was planning to give blood, had scheduled time for it and everything. Drove across town, only to find out that their software was down. We laughed a bit about plans gone awry when she said, “Yeah…it’s not the first time.” I laughed and said, “I have gotten turned down a bunch. Underweight, low iron, you name it. My good intentions are just smacked down.”
It was in saying those words that I flashed back, so vividly, to a blood drive held more than twenty years ago, at the church just across the street…
