Hooray Cliff!

It's probably no secret that I have a bad case of Hero Worship for Cliff.

There's a lot of good reasons for it too.

First, he's probably the only person I still know who's read much of my writing. Most of my readers were other High School and Middle School students, and I can't even recall most of them.

See, it was a very, very cold winter and they changed the time of my bus stop, so that I had to wait outside forever... It was nightmarish. So, I begged my mother to drive me to school in the morning, and in order to facilitate her drive to work she had to drop me off before the school was really open. It was dark in the halls, and none of the rooms were open, even the library. Eventually I noticed Cliff's room was open, and he was there, and I think I asked him if I could wait in there until class started. One day he noticed I was writing, and I remember him asking me if it was for class. When I told him it wasn't, he wanted to read it. Not knowing who Cliff was, or that he was even a English teacher, I let him read something of mine, and considering the time it was probably fanfiction. *cringe*

And the thing I was proudest about in my work, the thing I liked the best, that none of my classmates were sharp enough to pick up on when they told me they liked a particular story, was what Cliff noticed and complimented me on. Characterization. Still one of the things I'm proudest about.

Much more recent was my car accident.

If you're familiar with Chastain Road at all you can probably guess where it happened. That sharp twist in the road near the top, when you're coming down the hill. Someone pulled out next to me, and my car went out of control, and I ended up crossing the median, with my car spinning around in a 180, then going backwards across oncoming traffic in the other lane. You see car accidents in movies, see professional drivers pull cars out of spins and circles, easy as pie, and after a car accident you can't imagine how they do that because it happens so fast. There's no time to turn the wheel, either. A good Samaritan and his wife got my car out of the road, and waited with me until the police showed up, then disappeared before I could thank them or get their names.

Next to the car accident the worst part of it was calling my mother, and asking her to come sit with me. Not that I was sitting, but you get the idea. Her response was something along the lines of "you've already called AAA and the police are on their way, what would I do?". So I waited with my car, alone. Crying, because from the time of the accident until about an hour and a half later I couldn't quit.

And Cliff came. Cliff came, and he sat with me. He looked at my car, and got an umbrella because it was raining, and even if I have umbrellas I never use them, and somehow him holding the umbrella over me in the drizzle was pretty much the most comforting thing ever.

He came and sat with me, when my mother wouldn't. I can't make it any more poetic than that, any more graceful, true, or heart wrenching.

I also can't adequately describe how much that meant to me. 'Heart wrenching' might be the best word, after all.

What inspired all of this?

Cliff's recommendation of a Lifetime TV show, Blood Ties. Just by this, Cliff has shown a mastery of a skill that my mother's boyfriend/ex-boyfriend Fred has never quite figured out existed. See, they've dated since... I was eight, I guess. Seemed like they might get married in my teens too, and then that just sort of angrily cooled into a sort of friendship. Despite knowing my mother and I that long, Fred has no clue what to get us for holidays. There's generally a lot of calling involved, asking what we specifically want and where he can specifically get it. And in my case, despite time spent explaining, this still usually results in me getting cash. Because it's easy, I guess, and no thinking is involved, though Mom likes to defend him sometimes by saying Fred knows I'd rather buy what I want, but I don't believe that.

Mom watches Lifetime religiously and she didn't see the commercials for this show, or think I might be interested in watching it.

Somehow Cliff did. Cliff called last night to tell me when it was on and that I might like it. So, right in the middle of a Scion Demo, I paused the game and turned on Lifetime to find, for the first time in many, many years, if ever, a non-mopey vampire. And I love vampires! All of them, probably. In my organization of my book collection I added a drop down for vampires as a topic, so I could see how many vampire books I actually have, and despite the fact that my whole collection of books isn't in the organizer I have 67 vampire books out of 398 books cataloged. And despite being on the up and up of vampire novels, and knowing who Tanya Huff is (since she's in every DAW Anthology ever) I'd never heard of the Blood Series. So, now I'm off to Barnes and Noble to get one.

Thanks Cliff, for everything I've written here and more. You embody, in a way the film never meant it, the description of Raymond Shaw, that Cliff is to me, "...the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life."