Sent Out

I ended a full day by driving home at two in the morning, windows down so I could enjoy the bit of winter the Valley allows. Sixty-five degree wind never felt better and just as I got on the highway Love and Memories came on the radio and for a few minutes I felt a little amazing, never mind my hair flying in seventy mile an hour directions or the short distance home.

A day like this, for all its simplicity, doesn't normally have this kind of ending. I visited my father and his wife, played with my nephew Rocco - he who enjoys chewing on fistfuls of hair if it's not stinging to the touch - ate Chinese for dinner and babysat for two nieces, Amanda who cannot experience life without high pitched wails of discontent and Emily, who at only two months doesn't know the difference anyway.

I should have come home and found comfort in bed, fallen deeply asleep instantly once my head hit the pillow. My drive home didn't allow it. I came in suddenly ravished, I laughed at the delicious morbidity of finding a carton of eggs on top of a box of cold fried chicken in the fridge and then helped myself to a snack. Then I came here to let you know of such an extraordinary end to such an ordinary day.

If I ever figure out what this was all about, I'll let you know.

Read more...

Second Play

Last night I sat around with my brothers and sisters, drinking margaritas, playing poker, passing around the next generation and enduring all-too-familiar teasing. It's a way they show their love, the teasing, the ribbing, the ohgoodnessgraciousmakeitstop joking. It makes me fear introducing someone new to them because they'd have to be made of hardy stuff to get through the night.

My siblings are making me laugh a great deal, though, the way they seem so much more overprotective of me these days. I used to live nearly five hundred miles away and hardly thought about it. That may be an incorrect assumption, but it's not like my brothers called often and my sister would say she missed me, but she had her own life going on. But now that I'm here, Eli has taken to beating me over the head that he's glad for my presence (it's a brutal sort of love that I don't quite understand), while both Becky and Ace make sure I call when I get home after leaving their homes, despite the distance between mine and theirs has dwindled down to just a couple miles.

Perhaps they know something I don't, but I think I'm better off just rolling with it.

Read more...