An Artsy-Corny Weekend
This weekend was wonderful.
Well, actually, it started out not-so-great. Friday starts my weekend because it is the day I have an intern meeting instead of going to the coffee shop to work. This Friday there was a major detour on the way to the office and I wound up being about thirty minutes late. As I slid into a seat (it was the last remaining, I assure you) next to Matt, he said loud enough for Echo, on the other side of me, to hear, “Good afternoon.” I smilingly replied, in the same undertone but with an added sweetness he will never achieve, “Bite me.” He grinned. Echo just stared at us and said, “You too are so mean to each other! If you don’t start behaving nicely to each other we’ll have to make you sit side by side and hold hands for an hour– or until you can be friends.” I think I may have had a legitimate gag reflex. Gosh, though, nobody gets under my skin this bad! I’m not a habitually mean person, but Matt pushes all the right buttons. Grr.
But from there, the week-end improved. Rachel and Alex were out of town, so Tammy came down and spent the week-end with me. We watched Life is Beautiful Friday night (complete with wide-screen format, Italian language track and English subtitles, and surround-sound), and spent Saturday morning in downtown Naperville, where we went in little gift shops, jewelry stores, and galleries, and spent way too much money at book stores, and got take-out at an Indian restaurant and ate it on the Riverwalk. Tammy is great. She’s into the arts (her degree is in theater) and her shopping style is as spontaneous as mine. A very artsy morning. Then I went home to let the dog out and play with her a little bit, and Tammy went to church to teach Saturday night Sunday School (however that works). Saturday night we had a chick-flick fest (You’ve Got Mail, Father of the Bride– because Tammy just got engaged– and Sabrina– the new one w/ Harrison Ford) and we went to church together on Sunday morning.
I was invited to hang out at a youth group event tonight: SmashFest. It was so much fun!!! One of the staff members, Nick, lives out on a farm (the farm itself isn’t his but the house he and his wife Lisa live in is on the property). We had a bonfire and made hotdogs and s’mores, and whomever wished to participate used an ax and a large mallet to smash all of the following: Several peaches, oranges, grapfruit, and various other small-ish fruit, a watermelon, a bottle of chocolate syrup, two bottles of catsup, a large metal storage cabinet of the garden office variety, and a small upright piano. This was a little amusing at first but it failed to amuse after the guys began to be covered in catsup and to smell kind of funky, and the female leaders to worry about whose car or mini van they would ride back in. But the really brilliant part was that we were out in the middle of no-where, on an honest-to-goodness farm, where I could pet horses (two chestnuts and an appaloosa) and dogs as much as I wanted to and catch fireflies and look around me and see nothing for miles but meadows and red barns and white wood-frame houses and silos and a sea of corn and soy beans. I’ve missed that, somehow. It made me so sorry I won’t be at the Butler County Fair this year…although I’ve been sad about that for two months now. Oh, well; c’est la vie. I had so much fun! And I think I’ve made a few new friends tonight, too. Mainly wives or girlfriends of the youth group staff. They are all about my age, which is kind of scary, but they are nice and more at my stage of life than some of the interns seem to be.
It was a beautiful sunset: purple streaked with pink and gold as the day kissed the sky goodnight; and an even more beautiful dusk: a lovely, dusky dusk full of mystery and friendliness as if it were conspiring with us, and full of the humming of crickets and the tiny sparks of fire flies, looking like midsummer fairies in the fading light, and the larger splash of light that was the bonfire, obscured or flaring up higher by turns as the glancing shadow-forms of teenagers threw the remains of the piano on it.
Yes, it was a wonderful weekend.
July 20th, 2004 at 10:34 am
you need to be a writer! the lavish way that you tenderly described the sunset nearly made me cry. and the way you sweetly told matt to bite you made me proud. i’ll call you soon…but what’s your number again??? oh, and i sent you a little something in the mail today…enjoy!
July 21st, 2004 at 12:38 am
Yay, Jules! You’re back! When are you coming to Naperville? You know you wanna hit Portillo’s with me.