This is another post that has been sitting in Drafts for years that I finally decided to wrap up and post.
My first memory of Holly Blain isn’t actually a memory about her at all. It’s a memory about her brother, Beau.
I was sitting in the gym at Tyrone Middle School, when this kid I had never met before walks up to me. “Hi,” he says. “My name is Beau. My sister says you play Dungeons and Dragons and we should be friends.”
And, just like that, we were.
Holly was one year ahead of me at Tyrone, and we must have known each other in some kind of very tangential way, but I don’t remember ever really associating with her before that day. But somehow or other she knew that Beau and I should be friends, so she told her brother to go up to me and make it happen.
She did that kind of thing all the time. When Holly decided that something should be a certain way, she just expected the world to fall in line. If you didn’t know her, this behavior would come off as kind of selfish and irritating. I’ll be honest with you – it came off as a bit selfish and irritating even if you did.
But here’s what you have to understand about Holly. Here’s why Holly was so damn special. Holly did what she wanted to do, when she wanted to do it, and she believed that we should all be able to do that, and she would do anything in her power to make sure that you had the kind of freedom she wanted for herself.
I guess I can only explain this by way of personal example. When we were young, and going to Bennigan’s every Tuesday night to dance, Holly would go whether or not she had the money to get in the door. If she didn’t, she’d just count on being able to find someone who was willing to pay her way or convince the door man to let her in for free “this one time.” Annoying, right? But if she found out you wanted to go and didn’t have the money to get in the door, she’d offer to find a way to get you in as well. Whenever Holly came over to my house she would jump on my computer and use it without asking my permission first, and if you know anything at all about me you know I’m highly personal when it comes to my electronic devices (and, in defense of my highly protective nature, one time when she did this she saw something in my email that she really should not have seen). I had to start locking my computer and enable a guest account whenever she came around. Holly was the kind of person who had no problem whatsoever with someone using her computer without asking, so it never occurred to her to ask to use mine. If Holly was cold at my house she would adjust the thermostat, but if a guest was cold in her house she would expect them to do the same. You see my point? Holly did whatever she wanted to do, and she wanted YOU to do whatever YOU wanted to do, and if those two things happened to conflict with each other you just talk it out and smile and move on and keep on loving each other.
When I learned that she was flying to Texas to go to Butt-Numb-A-Thon even though her application had not been approved, I just had to smile. That was so very typical of Holly. Deny her admission to an event? Fine. She’d go anyway and hope she could change your mind once she got there, and even if she couldn’t she’d just enjoy the experience of trying.
That was Holly.
—
I started this post shortly after Holly passed last year. I did so knowing I would be heading to her memorial service and I wanted to get my thoughts sorted out before I did so. What I said at the service was pretty close to what I ended up writing here. I worried then that perhaps I might offend someone by what I was saying. Unless you really paid attention to what I was saying it was kind of easy to misinterpret my words as a criticism of her behaviors and personality when that was the exact opposite of what I was trying to do. I had the same feelings when I spoke at the funeral of her brother, Beau, where I also had words that were, perhaps, not the standard things you would hear in a eulogy.
But if there is one thing that I loved and admired about both of them it’s that they were very self-aware. They knew who they were, and how society perceived them, and it didn’t bother them if perhaps some of those perceptions cast them in a negative light.
As I get older and become more and more “conservative” and set in my ways, I think often of them and wonder how long they would have been able to keep that up. I know it’s a very unconventional way to think about a person, but as I frequently do I think about the quote from the end of Batman: The Dark Knight. “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Part of me believes that Holly and Beau were powerful enough forces of nature that they would have successfully fought the push to compromise on their core beliefs as they got older, and part of me is thankful I never had to see the opposite happen.
Which is a very selfish way of remembering them, I suppose, but there it is.
