Ah, dammit.
I’ve tried for an hour or so, but I’m fumbling about badly with most anything I try to write about the weekend, so I think I won’t try much longer. However, Mrs. Chili is slappin’ the play-by-play out of the park over at The Blue Door. If you’re interested in our weekend adventure, please do visit there too. I’m not going to attempt something parallel.
I’m glad the three of us made the effort to make it happen. I’m also thankful for all of our respective families’ support, because it took that too. To borrow a theme from the weekend, I feel like our friendships are blossoming now.
I’ll tell you, I wasn’t ready for the buzzkill at the end, though. Monday was a little ruder than usual. If we do it again, I’ll prescribe something distractive for myself with that in mind.
Take the time. This is not a dress rehearsal.
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So my play-by-play isn’t grinding in your gears? I recognize that every one of us had a different experience of the weekend; I don’t claim to speak for ANYONE but me. I’d actually be interested in your take on things, given that I was coming into your environment…
I have things to say; trouble putting into words. I will stab at it soon.
Saintseester: Copy. I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one.
Mrs. Chili: Of course not. I’m relishing your recollections. Perish any thought to the contrary.
I don’t really have a “take on things,” per se (beyond what I’ve written). I thought the whole weekend would be a blast, and it was. Despite my bitching about the rain and what-not, the weekend far exceeded my expectations.
I did ask you an anthropology question or two, if you’ll recall. I don’t often have the opportunity to ask an expressive and intelligent friend who’s never been to the South what her opinion is of what she’s seen of Alabama. (That’s a horrendous sentence; hope it parses.)
OK, you want my “haven’t been able to get it down on the screen”? Let me switch off the Smartassinator and the Cynicismatron (click) (click) and give it a shot. Here goes:
I’m pleased to retain the capacity to begin getting genuinely close to someone “new”–both you and ‘seester. I think that whether it’s cynicism, or a casualty of frenzy, or just plain apathy, a lot of people don’t do that by our age. People feel like they have enough friends, or they’ve been sufficiently abused to foster a belief that there are no real friends.
Yet here the three of us were/are opening ourselves to each other, when the “each others” were a bunch of tiny colored dots and a voice on the telephone for an hour a month. For me, the in-person validation was overwhelming. It’s beautiful, and I savor its poignancy, but I’ve a feeling it’s also at the heart of what wound up kicking me in the gut a little harder than I expected when I wanted one more day, and there were no more days to be had.
To me, it speaks to the strength of all that has come before in each of our three lives. Each of the three of us love, and is loved, deeply–by our spouses, by our children, and by special friends. But, perhaps paradoxically, this doesn’t represent consumed bandwidth. I think that positive emotional experiences snowball in a person’s soul, and a person has essentially limitless capacity for love and friendship once that base around which to snowball is there. I ache for people who don’t have it, because all too often people entrust me with the tale of their particular flavor of hell, and I don’t know how to tell them to get that snowball going. I recognize its presence in me as a tremendous blessing.
I expected to kick around and have a good time. I did that. But (it seems naïvely, now) I hadn’t considered that I’d be so touched. It compounds both the joy of the moment and the sorrow of its termination.
Bo, I love what you’re saying here. This isn’t necessarily MY experience (I’m constantly on the lookout for new friends (I think it makes Mr. Chili a little edgy, but I’m pretty sure it has to do with my latent self-esteem issues and a deep-seated fear of being alone, but we’re not here to psychoanalyze me…). It would never occur to me to be “done” making new friends – that feels a little too much to me like a stagnation of growth. I appreciate what you’re saying here, though; the assumption IS that one reaches a certain age (or a certain station or a certain whatever) and what you’ve got is what you get. I just refuse to buy into that, and I’m happy that you don’t, either. My life would be much poorer if you weren’t open to the idea of accepting me as your friend, and I’m glad that’s not the case.
I’ve been thinking more about my impressions of your hometown, and I’m not sure that I gave you a very comprehensive answer when I was there. Honestly, it wasn’t about the landscape or the food or the climate, it was about you and Seester – all the rest was just background noise. Now that I recollect it, though, I really enjoyed the difference in landscape. You already know I was enamored of your trees – New England is stuffed to bursting with aspen and white pine and maple trees; magnolia, dogwood and jacaranda don’t grow around here (at least, not without some serious care and attention). There is much more open space where you are than where I am – we have very few open vistas, whether because of hills (or mountains, depending on where in New England one is) or trees (though you can get a good view out over some pretty big lakes and, of course, the ocean). My neighborhood is a lot more suburban than yours. Yes, you can get to the airport in a few minutes, but I can walk five minutes to a full-service grocery store and can be at almost any of the major big-boxes (Wal-Mart, Target, (y’all ever seen a Home Dee-poe?) Best Buy, B&N) within seven minutes or so. I’m also situated pretty conveniently between two fairly big cities – Portland to the north and Boston to the south – so we’ve got access to damned near every cultural activity you can think of (Cirque du Soleil comes to Boston every other year or so, even). I felt as though I were more in the country when I was in Alabama than I do when I’m at home.
There’s more, but I don’t want to wear you out in one shot…
LOVE
Brang it! 😉