축하

Warm violent winds, tearing violet clouds, thundering rain. This was the Tornado Watch morning of mid-November during the morning service.

The big story of the day, of course, was Carrie’s foot tattoo. “St. Louis” scripted on the arch of her foot. That had been the original intent anyway…

“Both my birthday presents ruined,” Carrie declared. “First Messi got injured for the game tomorrow, and now my tattoo reads St. Lois. I hate November.”

The poor tattoo man [“He reminded me of a Boston Red Sox,” Carrie told me.] was very embarrassed, and promised to fix everything. Fortunately for him, Carrie didn’t say anything about it until she called later to report the incident.

“I’ve been putting acid on it so he can work on it later,” she explained as she left for the first birthday party of Paige Popp’s daughter.

Meanwhile, Rose sat on the couch and argued with Cherry and Linnea [two days removed from an overnight at the Lemp Mansion with Carrie and Eleda] about nose rings and tattoos while tweezering a piece of red glass out of her foot.

After Dad finished tae-kwon-do/air sword fighting Francis in the kitchen, he started discussing pizza options with Carrie. Carrie’s choice; she handed him a list.

“Does anyone here actually like vegetable pizza?” Dad asked.

Crickets. Almost.

“What do they even put on veggie pizza?” Dad asked. “Broccoli?”

“Yes, Dad. Broccoli.”

“Really?”

“No. Mushrooms, onions, olives…”

“Ooooh… No, no, no,” Dad cut that one off fast.

Dad, Francis, and I drove out to get pizza, taking a detour by Old Church to check out the wind damage on the roof…

“Damage ride! Damage ride!” Carrie chanted us off.

I guess it is sort of a family pastime…

After Grandma and Lucia arrived, and dinner and fudge brownies, Carrie had gifts: monies already spent on unfortunate matters. A hand-knit shawl in sapphire from the UK, and a pair of black shades.

Puck wanted another glass of water before bed. Bær put a stop on it.

“I guess I can just swallow my saliva,” Puck consoled himself. He disappeared into my room for twenty seconds and emerged with my orange jogging shorts which he handed to me and gave me a big squeezing hug. “I was just trying to get your health up so you can use these as jogging pants out in the wild.”

“Thank you, son.”

Back from his room, he had a few more thoughts.

“Ah! SEA MONSTER!… Why do bad things always happen to me in the fall? Like my friends teased me and I asked them not to tease me. And my Uncle Fran did some teasing that I didn’t like.”

We discussed.

At 10:13PM, Joe called me.