Buddies and the Brouhaha

Here's something fun to do. Gather up all your best buds and cart yourselves up to the lake for a need-free, demand-less, apple pie-laden brouhaha. Stay up until all hours. For fun, not because one of your kids is throwing up. Watch a show called Intervention together so you can psychoanalyze strangers. When that gets too sad, flip to the Miss Teen USA pageant and psychoanalyze hairdo choices and the mindset of the runners-up as they come to grips with the inevitable fact that their lives are ending. Talk about Everything. With a capital E. Eat Anything. With a capital A. Make sure nutritional value is minimal while fat and carbs are maximal. (I know. It's not a word, but it's descriptive.) Create a new drink. Name it the Lake Runner. Declare it medicinal and healthy because that splash of Pomegranate juice really does outweigh the 8 ounces of rum it's mixed with. Swim around on floats for six hours straight, getting out of the water only to have a snack, a cocktail, or because you fear the pruning may be permanent. Meet a dog and invite her to join your merry band of Beeches. Call her Buddy. Because she is. Until she starts eating your pistachios and smelling like a dog that has been swimming in lake water and chewing on fish heads. Be forgiving. Even when Buddy's family leaves her with you while they go on a boat ride, happily waving at her from afar as if they know quite well that she's a big ole pain in the rear. One of us is meant to be a vet or an old lady with 12 cats, and we love that about her. Learn to play Gin Rummy. Even though strategic thinking is not the easiest kind of thinking to do through a Lake Runner haze. Wave at boys on the lake and pretend that they find you remotely interesting. Sit on a dock under an almost-full moon for hours. And talk. And talk. And talk. There is nothing at all better than this. There is a certain kind of therapy that takes place when you learn that a bunch of people you love and admire are going through the same things you are. Good stuff. Bad stuff. Even the really bad stuff that you wouldn't admit to most people. The book I'm reading at the lake calls it L'ho provato sulla mia pelle, which means in Italian "I have experienced that on my own skin." The author explains that it means- I have also been burned or scarred in this way, and I know exactly what you're going through. Somehow there is nothing more comforting than L'ho provato sulla mia pelle. Being understood... it just makes everything better. And then you get to go home to a little family, who is happy to see you. Who, really and for true, missed your presence. And you feel needed. In a good way. Amazing what a little brouhahaing can do for you.

Dinner with Meme

I have the coolest supper club. We not only eat the most amazing food, visit the most amazing homes and laugh ourselves silly into the wee hours of way-past-our-bedtimes...we have these great conversations, too. There's this Question of the Night thing we do. I didn't realize this, but there's an equivalent in the blogging world called the meme. (Learn something new every day). This past week, the supper club's meme was "What was your first car?" which turned into "Tell us about every car you've had since you turned 16." Now, I must warn you, I'm the kind of gal who thinks a car is pretty much a mechanism to get from Point A to Point B, although I wouldn't turn down a red convertible if you offered me one. I once dated a guy who drove (he told me many times) a carefully restored, mint-condition Camaro. He was extremely proud of this vehicle. But when he drove up in it on our first date, I was apparently not as impressed as he would have hoped. He kept hinting around...so, what do you think of my car? And I think I said something about it looking very clean and asking did he recently wash it. (I know, catch a clue right?) I guess he was intrigued by my "feigned" non-interest in his car, and so he spent the next year of our relationship trying to "educate" me about cars. Yawn. In any case...I'm not a gearhead or whatever they call car people. But this dinner conversation was incredibly interesting to me, because I never realized how much of a milestone a car is to a person - myself included. There's always a story about where you were in life when you got the car, who you had to share the car with, what the car's name was, who helped you buy it, why you chose a certain make and model, how the car treated you and how you treated the car, how it made you feel about yourself.... It was all very telling about our personalities, our hopes and dreams at different times of our lives and how The Car is more than just transportation (OK, I'm finally getting it Mr. Camaro!). What was your first car? Mine was a Pontiac Sunbird - black interior and exterior...in Florida. Thaaaatttt's right. (It was implied at dinner that someone probably paid us to take the car instead of vice versa). It was ugly and it was hot, but I loved that car because it was MINE. And there is nothing like driving over the St. Johns River bridge at sunset with the radio blaring, the windows down (AND the AC on - sorry, Mom) in a car that is YOUR VERY OWN. You can't beat it with a stick shift.

Pictures Worth a Thousand

I've been away. I do so love to go away! This time I went to a magical place called: The Beach. They have the best stuff there! Sand, waves, sunshine, birds, shells, crabs, clams, M&Ms, books, stars, outside showers, long walks.... I like this picture of a mess of clams we dug up from the marsh... because when I look at it, I can smell them. It's weird. I also like this picture of baby toes in the sand because when I look at it, I can feel the sand on MY toes. And in my bathing suit. And in my bed sheets. And in my hair. You can never be free from sand at the beach. But it's OK, because it reminds you: I'm at the BEACH! I'm AWAY! And you feel smug and superior to all those poor saps back at home who have no idea what they are missing. I also very much like this picture of the sunset over the salt marsh, which was the view from our back door. Sure, it looks like a boring picture of a daily occurrence that you've seen a million times but when I look at it...I can feel the heat of that sun, which spent all day gathering itself oppressively outside our door. I can hear the tide coming in and feel the wind rushing the sun down: C'mon, it's time to go now! Bye! Bye! I can't see them, but I'm pretty sure a thousand little crabs have rushed out of their holes in unison to wave a one-claw salute to the sun: See ya tomorrow, See ya tomorrow! And behind me in the house, the sliding glass door opens and closes, opens and closes and there is the sound of children running back and forth between the sunset and the loud ocean on the other side of the house. They are tired and bickering and at their wits' ends, but there's "one more thing" (there's always one more thing!) that must be done before crawling into sandy sheets and literally passing out with exhaustion. Maybe a ghost crab hunt out on the beach or one more round of ice cream cones. One more book. And every parent in the house has got his or her mind's eye trained on the hour after this one, when we can go outside with adult beverages, listen to music from "back in the day," look at the stars and talk about what our lives were like before we knew each other and before we knew these strange creatures called Our Children. Yep, pictures are indeed worth a thousand words!

Coffee Talk

Here's a great thing to do.... meet your best friends for coffee once in a while. Sounds like something our grandmas would do, right? Man, did they have something! It doesn't require a bunch of pre-planning. You don't have to make an appoinment with each other three months in advance. You don't have to find a babysitter. You don't have to dress up. You don't have to impress anyone. You just show up at Starbucks or someone's particularly lovely and cozy home, sit in front of the fire, drink your cuppa and LAUGH! In my mind, this constitutes the perfect morning. This is one of the major perks of not having to go into an office on a daily basis. At night, I almost feel subversive telling Cutie Pie about it because I don't want him to suddenly realize what he's missing and insist I become fully employed once again. And really, there's nothing like friendship is there? You literally feel fed after coffee talk. Your little heart is once again beating full and robustly inside your chest. You can breathe easily. Your forehead uncrinkles itself from its "this is your mother talking" mode. Ahhhhhh. I do not take this for granted. This is very hard to find! Cool chicks like mine are darn near impossible to find in a girl's lifetime. Our conversation yesterday brings me to this old picture of my best friend and me when we were about 6 (the picture on the right is one of our daughters, ages 6 and 5). The first thing I'm thinking is that I would have loved for her to have been at coffee talk. She would have had many, many hilarious comments to add, and my Atlanta girls would love her. But she lives far away, so we sometimes do coffee talk over the phone ( is that considered phone sipping? )....which is also very nourishing but not as good as in person. When I visit her in Florida, we cram six months of coffee talk into a morning or two. She is an absolute treasure in my life. The second thing I think about when I look at this picture is that my family's pop-up camper is in the background, which was one of the aforementioned hilarious topics we discussed at coffee talk. In fact, the assignment for next month's CT was to bring in pictures of ourselves camping in our pop-up campers and/or tents when we were kids. We were pretty sure we would look like little clones of each other, due to the fact that our stories of family life in the 1970s were so very similar. Well girls, here it is. Did you also have the yarn-bow ponytails and horrid red, white and blue plaid pants? I thought so.

Love Stories

I had a great evening on Saturday night. It was the first meeting of a new supper club I've recently joined. The theme was Southern Cooking...which suits me quite fine, let me tell you. We snacked on Redneck Caviar, drank peach Bellinis and ate a Southern chicken pie, a recipe from the host's grandmother. Oh yes, and chocolate bread pudding for dessert. (I'm sure Doc was getting a vibe across town....didn't I tell her not to eat that stuff??? But I digress...) The best part of the night was the conversation. It's not often that you have a good conversation with a group of fellows, especially when you've just met several of them. The topic introduced at dinner was: Tell us how you met and fell in love. Every person had a wonderful and unique story to tell. I particularly liked one in which the couple, both from the North, met when they were the only two people to drive into work during the Atlanta Blizzard of '93. Others started as friends. Some felt a spark right off the bat. I didn't get a chance to inquire, but I want to know: How many felt that "love at first sight" thing? Or not love at first sight, since we all know that is a myth, but something at first sight. Something that made you say to yourself, "Hey, this person is going to be in my life somehow, someway. Forever." That's how it was for me. I wonder how many other people feel that?
During Christmas vacation, Cutie Pie and I went to a B&B on the beach for a little R&R. Every night at 6 p.m., they had social hour, which Cutie Pie and I began referring to as Wino Hour ( a little tradition we quickly came to love and now sorely miss ). The B&B provided wine and appetizers, and everyone would emerge from their rooms to chat and share a cup of good cheer. We met a cute couple, going the second time around, who planned to be married at the B&B on New Year's Eve. They fell in love on New Year's Eve one year ago. They had been friends for years and worked together also, but last year, on NYE, he happened to reach over and brush the hair from her cheek. Electricity ensued and tada - they were getting married. The tiniest gesture led to this huge thing.
So back to supper club... It was so cool to think of this random collection of people at the dinner table, and rewind their lives to Before. Before careers, before kids, before houses and moves and Real Life, whatever that is. I got a glimpse of a moment in each person's life that turned out to be quite momentous. Very cool.