An Unexpected Deviation
Crackers was trying to wake me up. Sometimes we can’t find her before we call it a night, so we let her roam the upstairs as well as the downstairs. This often results in an early wake-up call:
“MEOW! MEOW!”
My mostly asleep brain interpreted this cat-speak into, “I would like to make an offer of $160,000 on your house.” Before I could reply, “Sold!” I woke up.
They were predicting another winter storm on Saturday night. So I flipped on the first Spring Training game of the year during lunch, myself now just two weeks removed from the possibility of thunderstorms and lightly crowded beaches off the east coast of Florida. Puck wasn’t as interested in the game – I won’t force baseball on anyone – and turned to his clementines:
“Puck, you’re smacking, hon. Keep your mouth closed.”
“What?!”
“Yup, you are.”
He paused, as if for effect. “You can’t believe everything you hear, Mom.” And began building up a fortress around Crackers to keep her away from the lunch spread.
I worked up some type of gumbo for dinner: red beans, rice, and fish. To my amazement, Puck swallowed the whole bowl, beans and all:
“Sort of tastes like bacon,” was his reasoning.
I’ll take it. He’s not a picky kid, but when it comes to beans, hope is limited. Just like with his father.
If my recollection is correct, it’s been about seven years of movie nights this spring, holed up in the cold box of a basement every Friday – once Thursday – night. And the tradition continues, albeit a waxing and waning of members. Carrie-Bri, Rose, and Ricky walked through the front door all somewhere before eight o’clock. But we didn’t even end up watching a movie, just sitting around for four hours in the living room circle with a Korean table of Trader Joe’s maple cookies, peanut butter cups, baked green peas, and sparkling blueberry juice, swapping tales and opinions about the world. This began with, “What makes you vomit?” A question inspired by that night’s round of Bean Boozled. Segwayed into best pick-up lines at a grocery store. Rose, naturally, invented and/or tweaked some beauties:
“I’d just drop a five-pound bag of sugar on the floor and ask, ‘Oh, did you drop your name tag?’ Or I’d hold up a bottle of wine and wait for a guy with red hair to walk by and say … ‘This would go excellent with some ginger.’”
These ridiculous conversations began tapering around Ricky’s explanation of the various Spanish accents around the world, close to midnight. So this is the social life I’ve been missing out on since high school. It’s kind of fun to laugh that hard on a Friday night. The ISTJ/ISFJ has spoken.