Community: Connections that heal

"We don’t heal in isolation, but in community.”– S. Kelley Harrell

“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.” – Herman Melville

In my journal this morning, I shared a moment of gratitude for the connections I’ve made on Fort Myers Beach. So many of my friends and neighbors are friendly, kind-hearted folks from the Midwest. I was journaling just how blessed I am to live here.

I acknowledged Goodness & Mercy for bringing me in contact with so many good people. I really love the people on this island. It fills me with a sense of connection to this place, one that I’ve felt for more than a decade.

COMMUNITY

I am blessed to be a part of this island community. I feel a sense of community here that I haven’t felt in over two years.

I understand the importance of it. I am a pack animal. Since childhood, I’ve always been very social. I guess you could say I “came by it honestly.” My mother, God rest her soul, was voted “class flirt” in her 1967 high school yearbook. 😄 Everyone of my high school teachers told my mother, “Chris is always talking in class. If he’d just apply himself…” But that was the best part of attending a small, Catholic high school with kids I’d known for years…some since the first grade!…was being social and honing some basic and crucial life skills. I didn’t realize it as a teen, but I was building community. And a few of those connections have lasted a LIFETIME!

Feeling connected to “your pack” helps provide a sense of belonging. I realize that now that I’m older. I appreciate and cherish those connections. It helps to waylay loneliness and the feeling of isolation.

In the Information Age in which we live, it’s easy to rely on social media for those connections, but it can create a false sense of community. I try to see platforms like Facebook and Instagram as vehicles to maintain those connections and create new ones. I have more of an appreciation for that having been off the latter for almost a year before rejoining in July. It’s so nice when those virtual connections get flesh and bone when I finally meet a new FB friend in person! And since moving back to the island, you wouldn’t believe how many new friends have come up to me excitedly, “I follow you on Facebook!” It always makes me happy. A new member added to my pack.

MY BOULDER COMMUNITY

Meet Nicole Speer, Boulder Town Council progressive now running for mayor. She is part of my pack out there. We met while volunteering to feed and clothe the city’s homeless. My pack included MOSTLY unhoused people, as I was one of them.

I made good use of my time out there in 2020-21 advocating for the unhoused while living with them and volunteering to assist them get a leg up. They WERE my community, a tight-knit family.

I volunteered weekly with Feet Forward, Inc., founded and operated by my friend Jennifer Livovich. Her organization fed me in the park several times, then I began helping her team setup, befriending many of them and earning her trust. In a matter of weeks, I was at her place helping to organize and load supplies for the weekly community meals. It’s where I made many friends, like entrepreneur and Feet Forward board member Graham, and volunteers and community activists, like Nicole.

I met her when she was considering a run for City Council and became a member of her campaign team, helping with social media content. She got elected the month after my father’s passing forced me to leave Boulder for good. And now look at her! I am so proud, as she is a beautiful person inside and out!

But I realized with this morning’s moment of gratitude just how much I MISSED THAT feeling of community.

I left Boulder, buried my Dad and bounced between the Indianapolis area and Evansville for months at a time, 19 of them in all. At the end of May, I landed back on Fort Myers Beach…MY BEACH! This island has felt like home to me since I first landed here the summer of 2011. And not a day goes by that I don’t ride my bike up and down this seven-mile paradise and get waved to, honked or hollered at by a member of my community.

It feels good to be connected again…to have a pack. That’s all.

Tribute to a childhood friend

MELISSA JAMES SALMON
November 30, 1968 - May 7, 2022
(Click for obituary)

We grew up in Indianapolis together, a couple of Winston Drive kids in one of the city’s middle class neighborhoods near Arlington High School on the city’s Northeast side. My family moved to 5701 Winston Dr. the summer between my fourth and fifth grade years.

A few houses down towards the cul-de-sac was the two-story James residence. Melissa was 2.5 months younger than me and one of my first neighborhood playmates. I was just beginning to notice girls, but we were too young for romance. I’d spend time playing in her room upstairs and her family was always warm and welcoming.

Before long, my favorite playmate was leaving the neighborhood, the city, the state for good. I don’t remember any teary goodbyes but I always had fond memories of Melissa, her amazing smile, her dimples and her friendship when I was literally the new kid on the block.

Some years passed, nearly a decade, and there was a knock on our front door. Mom told me there was someone here to see me, but didn’t say who. I wasn’t expecting anyone. I walked downstairs and turned towards the open front door, and through the screen I saw that bright, warm smile and those dimples. She was no little girl, but a beautiful young woman, a teenager finishing high school. I was blown away!

The family had come back to Indy from New Jersey for a visit, circa 1985. I met Melissa on the porch and then we walked down the street past her old house, catching up and recalling old times. It was a wonderful, but much too brief visit. Then she was gone again, like a flash of warm sunlight.

I lost touch with her for many years, then social media bridged the gap. Now married with kids, Melissa was about to relocate with her family to Central Florida. I was in Tallahassee with a family of my own. We kept up a casual acquaintance online with vague future plans to someday meetup. We watched each other’s kids grow up on Facebook. That was until I lost my account last year.

Fast forward to October 2023 and I have only been back on Facebook a few months. I’d failed to reconnect with so many old friends, focusing on new ones and building a following for my online newspaper on Fort Myers Beach. Well, who shows up in my friend requests, but Melissa’s mother, Linda James. I asked her to give my regards to her daughters. The whole family was now in Florida, I learned.

But it was only TODAY that I learned of Melissa’s sudden death. Linda’s message to me read, “Melissa passed away last year unexpectedly, but she talked about fun times with you all on Winston Dr…”

I was floored.

How did I not know? Why didn’t I keep in better touch?

Melissa flourished into a beautiful woman, wife and mother. I thoroughly enjoyed watching her life through photos and other online content. I admired her greatly. I’m not sure I ever got the chance to tell her how much, though I often told her what a shock it was to see her through the screen door in the 80s. I remember it like a scene from a movie, me moving for the door in super slow motion.

Rest in peace my dear friend. You were dearly loved.

Melissa and husband David in 2017

Indiana Roots

A few years back, I started a private Facebook group for my immediate family, prompted by my niece Kyrsten’s inquiry about our family history. It was called OUR INDIANA ROOTS and it traced my mother’s family back to pioneer times. That page was sadly lost because I failed to name anyone else administrator before my account was hacked and permanently deleted.

I was off the social media site for close to a year. When I rejoined the Facebook community this summer, there was no getting that content back. I still have my research and my Ancestry account, but all the family connections I’d made previously, I’ve yet to re-establish. And since arriving on Fort Myers Beach, I’ve had very little time to focus on genealogy, a decades-long passion. I think I’ve had my laptop open a couple of times.

I went back through this blog to find some of the old posts and so here is a sampling:

Indiana Roots

https://nolesrock.blogspot.com/2017/02/our-indiana-roots.html

https://nolesrock.blogspot.com/2010/11/morris-birkbecks-notes-on-journey-in.html

https://nolesrock.blogspot.com/2016/03/mary-mills-white-my-5th-great-aunt.html

https://nolesrock.blogspot.com/2017/11/4g-grandfather-duston-mills-pioneer.html

https://nolesrock.blogspot.com/2015/08/200-years-in-indiana.html

I’ll get more settled here and find time to do more research and writing. I already have a 600+ page manuscript on my Mills family, Mom’s pioneer ancestors. One day that’ll be a published work of mine. One day.

My Dad

We didn’t always see eye-to eye, me and him. I was his oldest and too much like him for their to be a lot of middle ground. We were stubborn, hot-headed and we both loved the same woman—my Mom.

Like most teenagers, I rebelled against his authority and his autonomy in the home. I didn’t want to get up and go to church on Sundays. When I refused, he’d drag me out of bed or coerce me with a glass of cold water. I only bowed up at him ONCE. He offered for me to take the first swing. I took one look at his meat paws—plus he was 6’1” to my 5’9” and outweighed me by 150 lbs—and came to my senses.

But that is often fathers and sons. Many never get past their egos, their pride and stubbornness.

Fortunately, that wasn’t the case for me and my Dad. We were both passionate, sensitive, spiritual men who could find that middle ground. In fact, we became rather close and his pride in the man I had become was evident.

A spiritual retreat weekend in October 1989, just after he and the family moved back to Indiana from Florida, sealed our friendship and mutual respect. There was a special moment at that retreat in Dowling Park, FL, at Camp Suwannee where we hugged, cried and expressed our affection for one another. That’s a moment I’ll always cherish.

Dad was most proud that I’d become a man of faith and a leader in my church. I was actively involved in music ministry, helping the youth group, organizing retreats for teens and men’s ministry. I supported his ministry efforts in Tallahassee and Indianapolis, as well.

But over the years, as my faith matured and I shed organized religion, we didn’t speak as much. Our political views differed greatly, as well, as I became disenfranchised with the church and our government. Dad was a Reagan Republican. I went to a liberal arts school. I vowed not to get into it with him. In our later years, I always diverted conversations away from religion and politics.

My divorce in 2013 became another bone of contention. Dad believed I was her spiritual covering and that if I’d just return to my former faith in God, the magic would be restored. I didn’t see it that way. He did his best to support my ex and even offered to relocate her and the girls to Indy. He loved my girls and my ex-wife with a fatherly, supernatural love, so I forgave him.

I loved my Dad.

After Mom died in November 2015, he was lost and alone and my heart went out to him. He didn’t always show it, but Mom was his whole world! They met in the small town of Princeton, Indiana, growing up in Tower Heights. He was her paper boy and was smitten at an early age. They began a love affair in high school. I saw how the loss devastated him, so in the Spring of 2016, just months after Mom died of cancer, I determined to spend my summer with him in Cicero, IN.

That is time I will always cherish. It is second only to the three months I stayed with him in 2020 (Aug-Oct), the year before COVID took him.

When I boarded the train in November 2020 bound for Boulder, CO, I knew that was the last time I’d see him alive. We said our goodbyes at the train station in Indy. As I walked upstairs to the train platform, I looked down and saw the lost man again, all misty eyed and not wanting to turn and leave. That was the last time I saw my Dad. He was sad to see me go. He knew that I needed to be with my daughters in Colorado, so he purchased the ticket.

The following September, he got sick and was hospitalized. They sent him home for a few days, but he was back barely able to breathe. I got the call from my sister, Keely, his caregiver, on October 4, 2021. He was gone. I was so glad for that time in 2020 and that moment at the train station.

I know my Dad loved me. He loved all of his kids, even his in-law children, like my ex. I was his firstborn son, and even though he struggled to express it regularly, I knew he was still proud of me. In a conversation with my sister, Heidi, which she shared at his memorial service, he said was proudest of the Dad I had become. That meant the world to me!

He set the standard. Miss you, Dad.

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