Not the Best Birthday
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Lucia’s 20th birthday. And Carrie was bringing a Sponge Bob party hat for her to wear in celebration, which she would have done… However, poor Lucia arrived at work, lost her groceries, and returned home for a sick day.
So it was just Carrie who came over to the house for lunch – her usual: beef jerky and an apple – eventually supplementing with some bubble pizza casserole.
Lucia was, at least, enjoying herself somewhat at work those first days of her job. She had made friends with a fellow male co-worker with a bit too much flare for the feminine. They seemed to hit it off.
“I’ve already had pen caps flying at me from across the room,” Carrie had said the other day.
Perhaps there was more goofing off than getting work done from Lucia’s corner. Either way, she wasn’t there to participate in any shenanigans for that day. She was home to recuperate; perhaps her evening would be salvaged before her birthday ended.
Meanwhile, in other tidbits… Carrie seemed to be showing some signs of interest in NASA. One of OLeif’s and Collette’s neighbors made a living tending tropical plants in office buildings. Their parent company operated on exotic plants in the Louvre. And Collette had listened to an eighteen year-old harpist play a full-blown concerto on the radio broadcasting from Interlochen, Michigan. Later in the girl’s interview, she told her audience that she had missed out on a lot, growing up. She had only just tried her first caramel apple and s’more the year before. And it was her first year to ever have made a snow angel. She had never been ice-skating. And because she was so deprived, the interviewer on the radio show brought out a freshly baked apple pie for her to sample, another American food which she had never tried. Collette wondered if she had missed out on such things because she had always been practicing too hard to notice the rest of life. Everyone had interesting lives to some degree. And some experienced those lives more intensely or more adventurously than others.
Earlier that morning, Collette was back to work with Rose through psychology and mathematics. This was before Rose, Mom, and Joe left for the big day. Another rehearsal beginning at one o’clock. Apparently Bluebell had hopes of running through the entire program twice before the evening began at 6:30.
So around the teaching, Mom worked on Rose’s hair, which had to be done prior to her arrival at The Columns that afternoon. Rose brought out the spools of ribbon, the bobby-pin cards, and her can of extra heavy-duty hairspray. Sometime later, Mom had managed to curl it up in such a way, with a good dose of bright gypsy ribbons, that it would not fall apart before the evening had ended. She finished by wrapping a piece of gold and black fabric around her head as a large headband. Rose seemed satisfied with the results.
She then carefully raided Carrie’s jewelry to gather a bag of rather exotic necklaces and rings which she set aside with her costume.
Once this was finished, Rose presumed to torture the black cat by decorating her with the other Sponge Bob party hat. She snapped several pictures between mews and then resumed her studies.
Meanwhile, Linnea was sitting outside on her little picnic table on the patio again. She had added more drawings to her chalk art from the previous afternoon. And there was a new message under the first:
“insects don’t come over here again or else”
The rest of the day, Linnea seemed to somewhat overcome her fear of the creepy crawlies and spent part of her time trying to find someone to play badminton with her. Collette assured her that Francis would gladly play several rounds when he returned from his morning choir.
And Rose kept complaining about school, something about all of her friends being on spring break and how beautiful it was outside…
Another good doctor’s appointment that afternoon for baby and Collette. As storm clouds rolled in from the west, Dr. Brazil looked over all the statistics once again. He said that everything looked just great.
“It doesn’t look like you’re going to have a very big baby,” he said.
Collette liked the sound of that, as baby elbowed her in the stomach.