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2004-01-18
I'm already in
We are driving home from a late dinner in Appleton, a dinner of barbecued ribs with Joel and Cheri that was messy and saucy and everything a rib dinner should be, complete with discussions of beard washers in the men’s bathroom and ending with the sentence “That’ll do pig, that’ll do.” We ate with our fingers. Esteban finds sauce under his fingernails. We have roused the Beatles “Let It Be…Naked” from its spot in CD 2 with a disk that Esteban made during the afternoon. His disk begins with the sweet virginal “Green Bird” from a Cowboy Bebop something or other, and then switches to Audioslave. He never thinks about disk transitions. I’m thinking about winter. It snowed quite a bit in the last few days, going from a completely brown and faded landscape to the one you see in storybooks and Christmas villages. Except that this is January, and there is nothing more desolate than after dark in January when it is cold and the wind is blowing and there are no people outside because they’ve all shut themselves away from the night. It makes your soul cold just looking at it. In fact, Esteban has turned the heater up to 75 degrees and has his seat heater turned up to High, which, after ten minutes in my opinion is hot enough to roast a chicken. Perhaps even a small turkey. In fact, I often turn on the seat heater on the passenger side when I pick up a pizza from our favorite little pub downtown.
I, however, am warm. I have spent a much larger than normal percentage of my day outside. My niece and I went to the wildlife sanctuary to feed the ducks and geese, then we painted pottery at the Yuppie Women With Too Much Disposable Income store. Afterwards, we picked up Mo and trekked out to a tiny town on the Bay for High Maintenance Hamburgers. Then I had planned to go to the home improvement store and buy the 4 inch base trim so that we can finally consider the living room finished (it’s been eight months since we ripped the old stuff off… note to self: stop waiting for Esteban to take initiative, it’s all me, baby. This is not news.), but with the truck being “broken” (alternator something something towed something… yeah, with the car maintenance, it’s all him, baby, and that’s not news either.), I would have to find another way of transporting it. Thus, Esteban made arrangements for me to borrow one of our friend’s trucks. Our friend lives ten miles away, and just as I was literally pulling into his driveway, my mom rings me on my cellphone saying “Where are you? I have a truck here right now!” Because once in every blue moon, my drunken mama pulls a coup of efficiency out of nowhere. Thus, I drove back to Green Bay, met her and the truck at the Hundred Dollar Store, and bought trim, primer, and some white high gloss paint, then loaded it up, along with a hundred pounds of salt (Mo needed salt too, and the 50 pound bags were a dollar cheaper than the 20 pound bags… I have no idea how that worked out) and then loaded the trim into the truck and then into my Mom’s house (she’s going to paint it for us, because she’s bored and likes to do that kind of thing, I guess.) Then, I salted our walks and driveway, squared away our outside defenses on the environment, and then hopped back in the now cold car to show Pennylicious how to set up a slideshow on my laptop, after which I walked around the mall for half an hour, and then met Esteban, Joel and Cheri at their house in gentrified BFE. And now, after our gluttonous late Saturday dinner, my ski jacket is in a lump in the backseat, looking like a third passenger slumped over, perhaps having had too many Famous Margaritas. Actually, I myself had one Famous Margarita (which was the size of three), so maybe that is why I am so warm. Esteban is in a foul mood because he’s been working during almost all of his waking hours. He’s got to be rounding ninety hours this week. This car ride is the first I have seen of him when we are not in our bedroom. Even so, I am vaguely sleepy and have a free-floating irritation aimed at nothing in particular. Probably because Esteban has just repeated that he is frustrated and hates everything and then repeats again that he hates his life and his job and wants everyone to die and is (direct quote) “angry like a penis in men’s prison”, which strikes me as beautiful and poetic and very unlike Esteban. We discuss this and he decides that perhaps he has to be pushed to beyond the breaking point and then he can be a great artiste too. Arr-teest. We love to pronounce it that way, especially when we talk about ourselves. A new song begins… quiet calliope sparkles of sound. “Who is this?” I ask, because it sounds old, and Esteban takes perverse pleasure in playing songs by artists that I do not like, hoping that I’ll admit that I really do like them. “Figure it out.” He says, in a way that tells me that this is definitely one of those times. “Who IS it?” The irritation is evident. Esteban sighs. I’ve ruined his game. “The Freddy Jones Band. ” “Oh my god.” I whisper. And so it is… the song is “In a Day Dream” by the Freddy Jones Band, one of the few bands in our collective history that we both enjoyed with absolutely no reservations. They entered our consciousness at the same time as the Dave Matthews Band and for a few weeks, we kept confusing the two. It was so long ago, back when we had two car payments (totaling $315) and $325 rent each month and it seemed like the national debt. We had more bills than income, and only made it work by alternating who didn’t get paid each month. A single CD was an indulgence, but on a rare splurge one afternoon, I bought a Freddy Jones Band for Esteban, to make him smile. Then, along with Big Head Todd’s “Sister Sweetly”, The Counting Crows “August and Everything After” and DMB’s “Under The Table And Dreaming”, it became part of the soundtrack for our second apartment, an airy second floor walk-up that sat on a slight rise and seemed to overlook the entire east side. It always reminded me of living in a tree house, because we were higher than the trees, living like birds in our little two room apartment with the enormous bedroom and walk-in closet. We were playing house together, two twenty-two year old kids with lugubrious car payments and no medical insurance, but a great stereo and two fabulous computers. And for a moment, the ridiculously cold January evening in 2004 faded away and instead, it was a lovely spring afternoon in 1994 and Chelsea and a practically embryonic Tilly were sitting on the back of the sofa (a teal and white striped number, now living in Joel’s theatre room) sniffing the pollen on the air and watching birds sitting in the branches below. They say that the first six months of living together is the hardest, but in reality, it's not. It's the second year. And then the third. In the kitchen, the sound of Esteban washing dishes and the smell of Murphy’s Oil Soap in my nose as I dusted our slate-topped end tables and wished we had enough money to order a pizza, not realizing that we were laying down our foundation, our genesis, the part where we were learning to live with each other, learning to be not just an “us” but also a “him” and a “her” and a “we”. “This is an awesome song. I totally forgot about the Freddy Jones Band.” I say, back in the snazzy leather heated seats, looking through a windshield of a car with payments higher than my entire 1992 gross monthly income. “I love this song.” “I know. I put it on here for you.” And it is then that I can see across the distance of years and appreciate the path we took to get to the now. I put my hand on his lap. He picks it up, kisses it, and then rubs it against his beard. And we drive just like this, onward into the crystalline night together.
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The final chapter of the quest for the Master's Degree - 7:22 p.m. , 2008-05-15 This is why I hate being late - 9:54 p.m. , 2008-05-07 show me how you do that thing - 4:36 p.m. , 2008-05-04 The swirly hair that broke the camel's back - 4:43 p.m. , 2008-04-07 Return of Lady Bigfoot - 9:26 p.m. , 2008-03-22 Anarchy
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