Friends Archives - Leslie Gibson McCarthy

Four decades later …

Posted on May 22, 20216 Comments

40 years ago this week, this.

40 freakin’ years. What kind of a cruel anniversary is this, when it really only feels like 10, maybe 15, just long enough to become who you are away from your high school and because of it.

40 years is the gray-flecked-haired stepchild of reunions. At 10 years, you’re still a kid just getting started. At 25 years, you think you’re old but what you wouldn’t give now to have the neck of a 43-year-old. Heck, even at 50 they call you golden and give you a parade. But 40? Who wants to celebrate that?

After the past 14 months, we should. 40 years ago tonight the Class of ’81 walked across the stage for the final time as students of Incarnate Word Academy, a lovely little all-girls’ school tucked away in a hamlet of north St. Louis County, run by an order of nuns from Texas whose mission was to educate empowered women. There were 96 or 97 of us, and we really didn’t quite grasp, I don’t think, what the world had in store for us. The Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word set the foundation; it was going to be up to us after that. At least they had given us punctuation. Oh Incarnate Word!, exclamation mark intended.

Oh Incarnate Word! is the first line of the school song, an exclamatory phrase that was prevalant throughout the four years that skirted the 1970s and into the 1980s, an era that started with bell bottoms, Jimmy Carter and disco and ended with the Preppy Handbook, Ronald Reagan and new wave music. It really was a weird time to come of age. Oh Incarnate Word! was spiritual and warm and fierce and flawed. But it’s where I learned that sisterhood is real, that you can match a lot with a navy blue jumper and that we were waaaaay ahead of our time with our Chuck Taylor sneakers.

Oh Incarnate Word! Where a Canadian English teacher taught you to read deeper, write longer and leave it all out on the page. Where the drama teacher told you the reason you didn’t make “Oklahoma” was because you couldn’t sing or dance, and instead of letting that break you, you just did something else. Where you heard “Be Not Afraid,” for the very first time at an all-school Mass and you knew immediately it’d be a song that would touch your soul again and again and again.

Oh Incarnate Word! Where a class of young women would go onto becoming doctors, lawyers, physical therapists, journalists, teachers, principals, PhDs, entrepreneurs, scientists, real estate moguls, wives and significant others, moms and step-moms, grandmothers and step-grandmothers, sisters and sisters-in-laws.

At some point this year, I hope we can get together and celebrate this night in 1981. Hit me up if anyone’s interested in planning a reunion for this fall. Until then, cheers to you lovely women who stood with me 40 years ago at the intersection of wonder and uncertainty, and went out into the world anyway, sent out with an exclamation mark. Oh Incarnate Word!

The Sunrise Project

Posted on March 27, 20153 Comments

March 27, 1963, was a sunny Wednesday, with a daytime high of 72 degrees. Nowadays, you can discover anything about a day in the distant past, from the No. 1 song (“He’s So Fine” by The Chiffons), to the popular movie (“Bye Bye Birdie” starring Dick Van Dyke), to the news that would make the next morning’s headlines (President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, parade in Washington, D.C.)

But I didn’t know any of that 52 years ago today. I was in a nursery at the old DePaul Hospital in north St. Louis, in the same room as the remarkable Mary Ellen Block. She was Mary Ellen Meyerpeter then, and, despite the fact we both grew up in Florissant, it would take us 51 years to reconnect.

Mary Ellen is my husband Tom’s second cousin, once removed — or something like that. She and Tom have the same great grandfather on the McCarthy side — good Irish bloodlines. So while we crossed paths at family funerals over the years, we didn’t really sit down and talk until earlier this year. Instant rapport, but then again we have seen the exact same number of days on this Earth — 18,993 to be exact.

Mary Ellen Block with her husband, Larry.

And then, because of Facebook, Twitter and other ways that social media connects us, I knew Mary Ellen wasn’t the only one whose date of birth I shared. My Incarnate Word Academy classmate, Kay Conroy Lenberg, was born that same day in the old St. John’s hospital, and Angela Shkodriani Sykora, a fellow St. Louis University High football mom, was making her debut in the old St. Mary’s hospital in south St. Louis.

All accomplished, strong women whose paths I had once crossed. It was time to cross them again and connect with the women who had seen, along with me, the same number of sunrises since that day in March 1963.

Women who were old enough to remember Neil Armstrong landing on the moon; whose first crush was Bobby Sherman or Donny Osmond; who bought 45s of The Partridge Family; who were taught typing on manual typewriters and for whom home economics was still a thing; who graduated from high school just as Ronald Reagan was starting his presidency.

Kay Conroy Lenberg with her husband, Butch.

We talked a lot, about the joys and struggles that have met us these 52 years. Among us four women are 18,993 days spent simply living life. We have successes and failures, achievements and setbacks, a lifetime of love and loss. Yet every single one of us lights up when talking about our children and grandchildren, more focused on the future than the past. The word that kept coming to me was resilience.

I called it the Sunrise Project, because it’s a blessing to connect with these women who have seen the same 18,992 sunrises as I have. I asked if they could recall their most memorable one. They could, in detail:

Mary Ellen, mother of twin girls and grandmother of one, remembers watching the sun rise over the Grand Canyon one summer day 2006, on a family vacation before the twins started high school. She and her daughters walked to the rim one morning, and saw a moose on the horizon. “It was beautiful,” she said, “and I kept wishing (my husband) Larry, who was sleeping, was here to see it with us.”

Angie, mother of two daughters and one son, was on a trip with her daughter Nina to Italy in 2007. She was in the town of Assisi and said she got up early to walk and remembers walking past a field of sunflowers that glowed in the early morning light. “It was like a postcard,” she said.

Kay, mother of two, stepmother of two more, and grandmother of three, was in Maine in June of 2012 at the home of now-husband Butch Lenberg when she got up early to watch the sun rise from his front porch. “I was freezing, but I just felt like all was right with the world.”

And me? I saw a whole week of sunrises last summer on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, but the one that stands out the most to me was that day in June 2008 when I saw the sunrise over Ireland’s horizon from the window of a plane, about to embark on a 10-day spirit-enriching journey.

Today, we add one more. As we will tomorrow, and the next day. Going on living, laughing, and loving because really, what more do you need?

Ireland2008 — An early morning on Ireland’s Ring of Kerry in June 2008.

A version of this story was published in the South County Times on March 27, 2015.

Song of my selfie

Posted on March 27, 2014Leave a comment

In 2014, it seemed selfies were everywhere.

From Ellen DeGeneres and friends breaking Twitter records at the Oscars this February, to Jimmy Kimmel attempting to break that record with the Clinton Family a month later, it was hard to get away from those self-inflicted, vanity-driven, smartphone photos.

Including here. This is a story about a selfie 32 years in the making.

It begins in June 1981, a senior trip for 10 newly graduated high school girls packed into two rooms of the Aku Tiki Inn in Daytona Beach, Fla.

I still have a hard time believing our parents let us go. But it was a different era, somewhere MTV’s “Girls Gone Wild” and the 1960s “Beach Blanket Bingo.” Girls Gone Mild, maybe, if you count fake IDs and skimping on sunscreen while our mothers were home saying Hail Marys.

Every life should experience a trip like this – lying on the beach by day and dancing by night – and I’m glad I did. Plus, I’m pretty sure those Hail Marys worked. The only real danger, it turned out, was sunburn and choking on the hairspray produced by 10 girls in two rooms.

Last November, five of us returned to the Aku Tiki Inn on an unseasonably cold, gray Florida day. It was during our 50th birthday trip, a gift to our friendship, and one day we drove an hour to seek out the same hotel in which we had spent those 10 days in June.

Can you pass through a place just once and remember it like it was yesterday? The giant Tiki man above the hotel marquee said yes.

Within 20 minutes, five 50-year-old women were frolicking on the same beach on which they played at the age of 18.

That’s when we took the selfie. But first, I took a picture of the selfie-in-progress. Looking at it now, I not only can see our 18-year-old faces; I can hear Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes” and Rick Springfield’s “Jesse’s Girl” — two songs played incessantly in clubs of the era — over and over again.

If you look closely, you can see a lot behind that selfie. All five of us are wearing sunglasses, perhaps to hide crow’s feet. The surf is churning and the wind is flipping our hair. But we’re all smiling.

At the moment it was taken, I remember thinking I could see myself on that beach 32 years earlier and wishing I could say a few things to five skinny girls lying on that beach applying iodine-infused baby oil.

For starters, I would have told them to skip the baby oil and invest in sunscreen. I might also have said something about not getting too attached to the music of Rick Springfield, but that wouldn’t have surprised anyone.

Instead, I might have said this:

You all will experience love and loss in one way or another, but be better people because of it.

You will have careers that come and go.

You will face financial hardships and emotional setbacks.

You will survive.

None of you will be wealthy, but you’ll all be rich because you’ll have children and families that matter, and friendships that endure – including one memorialized on a Florida beach.

A picture-perfect selfie.

A version of this was first published in the South County Times March 28, 2014.

Golden, girls

Posted on November 14, 2013Leave a comment

It has become, for me, as much a part of November as falling leaves and football: For the 19th straight year, a group of high school friends are taking a weekend to reconnect, rejuvenate and rehash old times.

Shopping at the Ozarks 2012. (From left:) Colleen, Beth, Stacy (standing), me, Janice — Shopping at the Ozarks 2012. (From left:) Colleen, Beth, Stacy (standing), Leslie, Janice

What began in 1995 as a way to keep in touch with our friend who had moved to Kansas City has turned into an annual fall event — equal parts pajama party, spiritual retreat, group therapy session and mini-reunion.

Most years, we head to a condo at the Lake of the Ozarks for a weekend of wine, relaxation and the outlet mall. But we’ve made trips to Kansas City, to Hermann, Mo., and to Branson. This year, we’re keeping a promise we made to each other many Novembers ago — when 50 seemed old — to do something fun and exotic for our milestone birthday year.

And so today, I’m waking up in a condo in Orlando, Fla. Exotic? Hardly. But the price is right and we have promised to avoid early-bird specials at restaurants and references to “The Golden Girls.”

And it’s with my oldest and dearest friends in the world: A group of women who graduated from Incarnate Word Academy in 1981 — Janice Vollmer Duncan, Stacy Stelzer Heinsohn, Beth Zang Kopfensteiner and Colleen Lake Scott. I have known two of them, Beth and Stacy, since first grade. That’s a long time. But time is why an entire year can pass without talking to each other, yet we always pick up right where we left off.

The weekends have some constants: Wine, shopping and something chocolate. There’s also indecisiveness over where to go for dinner and what time to leave to get there. But the good part is we know each other’s idiosyncrasies and love each other anyway. It is one of life’s greatest blessings to have friends like that.

We will do a lot of talking throughout the weekend, mostly about our husbands and kids. We will swear we’re going to lose weight by the next reunion, and we will dissect the challenges of life that have hit way too close to home, including loss of some of our parents, a couple of divorces, college expenses, the empty nest.

But there is music and laughter, too. We’ll rehash memories like sitting together at the cafeteria lunch table when our biggest joys were boys and our biggest fear was college. We’ll talk about how we managed to survive those years after high school when we thought we were indestructible. We’ll talk about our darkest moments and greatest achievements.

And this year, we’ll talk about turning 50 and still thinking we’re 32, which is how old we were when started these weekends. I’m sure next year we’ll be back in the Ozarks, but for now it’s all golden, girls.

A version of this column appeared in the South County Times Nov. 14, 2013.