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| Silver Jacket Street Jewels |
When I was 11 years old, I met a girl named Jade. We were instantly inseparable. She was everything I lacked and wished that I was. She was outgoing, loud, and said everything she thought. She would sing to anyone and everyone. The kind of friend that would yell out “my friend thinks you’re cute” at the boy that just walked by at the mall that you thought was cute causing you to hide behind her and be totally mortified. It was never to be cruel, she just constantly encouraged me to live out loud. She was the vibrant and beautiful soul vital to a painfully shy and quiet one.
The only times in my youth that I ever sang in front of other people was when Jade was standing beside me. It came easy for her and it wasn’t as terrifying for me in her shadow. We sang together every time we were together. Singing and training dogs were our big big dreams. We made dog training obstacle courses in my backyard and in hers. It consisted mostly of wood planks or large branches we’d lay across stacked concrete blocks. We’d run and jump over these courses along side our Labrador mixes.
We wrote our own songs and also sang along to cassette tapes. I’d created a mini makeshift recording studio with a large duel cassette boombox with equalizer and a microphone from Radioshack. I’d turn down the vocals with the equalizer and we’d just sing loud over them. We’d setup elaborate photoshoots around my house for our album covers. Hanging quilts off my bunkbed was a classic backdrop. We'd make detailed cassette jackets with the photos and credit pages with "We'd like to thank..." and everything. The hardest part was probably waiting weeks for the photos to develop. It was the early 1990’s and we wore acid washed jeans and a lot of hats and sunglasses. We had a very long list of possible band names and yet ended up with Silver Jacket Street Jewels. Everything on the list was a combination of a J word and a S word for our initials.
Neither of our parents let us listen to secular music so we sang a lot of Twila Paris and later Amy Grant. But we both had stashes…music recorded from the radio mostly. It wasn’t cigarettes and lighters hidden in Converse boxes in the closet, it was cassette tapes. Jade loved Sinéad O’conner's “Black Boys on Mopeds”. She would sing it to my face dramatically until I sang along.
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| Laura, Jade and Rachel |
A couple of years later when Jade wasn’t allowed to come over to my house anymore, I was devastated. We still saw each other at church and I was allowed to go over to her house, but her parents thought I wasn’t a very good influence after Jade came home talking about boys and repeated some things I had said to one of the boys at my school about sex, on the phone of course, as I couldn’t talk to a boy in person EVER. I was so shy at school that there were rumors I was mute.
In hindsight it was all VERY PG, no not even PG, more like G but when it’s your 13 year old daughter, I get it now that it was a protective move. They loved her so much. And how were they to know the avalanche of actual bad influences that would come later.
When we got separated we wrote letters. We continued to write songs and mail them to each other. And after her family moved to Colorado, we continued to write each other. We had a ongoing writing project in each letter, we’d write down a song title and each of us would write a song with that title in the next letter. We had so much fun reading what each other would come up with and how different they would be. We wrote hundreds of songs. I have converse boxes full of our letters.
Jade would speak truth to me when no one else would, and always had my back. She was the only one who told me that my high school boyfriend was cheating on me, hearing about it in Colorado, then she confronted him and gave him a verbal beatdown.
Jade called me once as an older teenager after running away from home. She was calling from a recording studio in Denver I think. She said her boyfriends band wanted to record one of my songs that she had shown them in one of my letters. I think it was a metal band and the song was super cheesy and I remember cringing that they'd even read it but Jade was always so encouraging and supportive. She was so excited. The call was brief and barely audible, possibly from a payphone. I didn’t hear from her again until years after that. She’d been through so many awful experiences out on her own and I feared for her when we'd catch up. But she would talk in a way like her stories happened to someone else and she didn’t need my help. I still thought she was so much stronger and braver than me. We lost touch as adults and only talked a few times in the past 10 years.
Jade passed away yesterday. I went to sleep numb. I woke up flooded with memories. I had just talked about her a couple days prior. I hadn’t thought of those times of our youth in so long.
I went up to the coffee farm, walked through the trees and listened to Twila Paris and weeped for my dear friend.
Under the canopy of my prayer tree I looked down and saw this flower… the only one around. It was her in so may ways, bold, vibrant and audacious. We had flowers like these in the midwest as kids. I’m so grateful for our friendship and those childhood memories. Thank you Jade for being my sweet sweet song. My creative partner and champion. My life was better just knowing you.
I know you are singing with angels.
Jade used to love to sing this, she could always sing so much higher than me.
except from “How Beautiful” Twila Paris
How beautiful the tender eyes
That choose to forgive and never despise
How beautiful, how beautiful, how beautiful
Is the body of Christ
And as he lay down his life
We offer this sacrifice
That we will live just as he died
Willing to pay the price
Willing to pay the price
How beautiful the radiant bride
Who waits for her groom with his light in her eyes
How beautiful when humble hearts give
The fruit of pure lives so that others may live
How beautiful, how beautiful, how beautiful
Is the body of Christ
Twila Paris - How Beautiful (Live)
Sinead O'Conner - Black Boys on Mopeds (Live)