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Last month, Mark, Mallory and I went to see Lincoln.  As is the nature of our half-assedness, we ordered tickets online but left the house later than we should have for a crowded Friday night that also featured the new Twilight movie.

When we got inside the theater there weren’t many seats left and so we sat near the front.  There were five rows ahead of us that were too close to the screen, then a wide aisle before the rest of the regular seats.  We sat to the left of the movie screen behind the aisle – a small row with only four seats.

Directly in front of us was a ramp that led to an emergency exit.

Throughout the movie my eyes kept darting to the exit.  Over and over.  There were no seats in front of us, and so I surmised that if that horrible night in Aurora, Colorado was replicated, I would dive onto Mallory and Mark would likely shield both of us.

Twice during the movie, a guy got up to share snacks with someone he knew who was sitting a few rows ahead of him and I watched his every move.  When friends asked what I thought of the movie, I said it was good and left out the part about feeling trapped for too long in a theater.

Ever since then I’ve thought about writing of that night.  I thought about it again last week when there was the mall shooting in Oregon.  I also thought that my anxiety level was reaching ridiculous levels.

I never fathomed it was about to go to a new place.

When I went to the City Council meetings last year which you can read about here, I saw my representatives in action.

One council member chowed down on a plate of spaghetti while listening to the citizens of Mayberry complain and it was a wee bit distracting.   At one point, he got up and went behind a door which I thought meant he was done.  Instead, he came out with another heaping plate.

When I asked somebody about it, they told me that because the council members usually come straight from work to the meetings, the city provides a dinner for them that most eat before the start of the meeting or during breaks.

Said councilman did not adhere to the manners of most.  Now he has gotten himself into some hot water that makes jumping into a pot of the boiling pasta kind look inviting.

He had a friend who was a little down on his luck.  Homeless.  A history of drug use.  A criminal record.  When he inquired of the police department as to what resources were available to help out this friend, they directed him to a shelter in Kansas City.   While that was an option, Spaghettiman instead gave him his access code, and for the better part of a weekend this guy was camping in the comfort of city hall and its municipal buildings.  Why he even invited one of his buddies over to enjoy the facilities.

Why in the world didn’t Spaghettiman bring his friend to his own house to spend the weekend instead of housing him in City Hall?

That was never an option.

No.  He could never do something like that.

He lives in his parents basement. 

Will was born three weeks after my dad died.  Maggie and I had spent the early part of the summer at Mom and Dad’s house and returned to Maryland in July.  By the end of that month, Dad decided to stop his treatments.

We were insured by Kaiser Permanente and the protocol when you were expecting was to alternate seeing a nurse one appointment, an OB/GYN the next.  I was seven months pregnant before I ever saw a doctor.

Things at home were going downhill quickly and Mom said we should think about coming home to see Dad one more time, but a woman as pregnant as I was couldn’t get on a plane without a note from their doctor.  I was going every other week for checkups and every time I asked the answer was “no.”  No you can’t go, no it’s too stressful, no we won’t write you a note.  No.  No.  No.

On an appointment when I saw an actual doctor and explained the situation again, he said of course you have to go and I’ll write the note right now.  He handed it to me and on his way out the door said, “But don’t deliver that baby in Illinois because Kaiser won’t pay for it.”

Mark, Maggie and I flew home with the intent of staying over Labor Day weekend.  Mom was under enormous stress trying to take care of Dad and since Mark had plenty of vacation time we ended up staying nearly two weeks to help out.

After Dad died and the funeral plans had been set, we booked our flight back to Maryland with US Air.  We went to the church, the cemetery and the luncheon afterwards then packed our stuff and headed to the airport so this baby would be born where we were insured.

I gave my note to the flight attendant and we boarded a very empty plane.  After the flight had taken off and I was using the bathroom, Mark told her of the circumstances of the past few weeks.  When I came back to my seat she said to me, “Honey, why don’t you rest and I’ll let you know when we’re about to land.”  Then she led me to an empty row of seats that she’d put pillows and blankets on so I could nap.

I was cried out by then but I remember how compassionate she was to a fragile pregnant woman who was on a flight into the unknown, and that the crappy doctor’s office I’d been dealing with all year could learn something from her.

While I was at work today, my friend, Carla, left a message.  I miss you.  I’ve been thinking about you.  Give me a call.

Sigh.

Carla was the first mom friend I made when we moved to Maryland.  She and Jim were fellow transplanted Midwesterners who lived a few doors down from us.  While we were moving in her mom kept an eye on the activity and later that day met Mark at the dumpster.  Do you have a baby, she asked.  Yes, six weeks old, he said.  My daughter lives there.  Her baby is three weeks old and tomorrow her and your wife need to meet each other.

The Big Daddy went along with Betty’s plan and that is how a twenty five year friendship began.

Since those years we have never lived near each other and long stretches of time go by when we don’t talk, but when we do it is just like the old days when we’d meet each other on the sidewalk with crying babies.

She had seen the photos from Maggie and Nate’s wedding and wanted to know the deets.  I filled her in about that lovely day and then we talked about everything from yoga to kids to us both turning into retail girls.

Whenever anyone asks me about the wedding and if I was emotional, I tell them about two things.  One was when everyone had come up the aisle and we were waiting for the bride.  I stuck my head out of the pew and looked at the back of the church and saw Mark and Maggie.

Oh Lordy, will you look at those two?   She’s so happy.  He’s so proud.

The other time I wanted to cry was when my hairdresser came to the house.  Nearly ten years of her taming my wild curls, hearing about my decorating projects, my dog, the garden, the kitchen I want to gut, my husband………..my husband!  There she was with all of her magic, and I still can’t talk about how much it meant to me to have her here that day without getting choked up.

With all that Carla and I talked about I never got around to that part but I didn’t need to.  If anybody would know about a full heart spilling over it would be the friend who was there from the start.

When the kids were little, The Big Daddy would take them fishing.  There were mishaps.  Oh, were there mishaps.  Like when he was putting yet another minnow on a hook and his glasses fell off his head and he had to fish them out before they settled into the murkiness of the lake.

I can’t say they learned to love to fish, but they did learn to love the tale.

My dad’s name was Bill.  My son’s name is Will.  My nephew’s name is Liam.  I am surrounded by versions of William.

When Maggie was dating in high school, her boyfriend’s best friend was named Will.  Since that breakup and over the years, Best Friend Will has remained a constant in her life.  He has been to our house many times and was an usher when she and Nate got hitched.

We heart the Will.

Maggie and Nate stood up in a wedding this weekend that we were invited to.  Maggie’s best friend and Will sat with Mark and I.  I chatted with them for awhile and after dinner the bridesmaid and groomsman joined our table.  I said something to Will which caused Maggie to announce, “I’m sorry.  I have to apologize for my mom, Will.  She’s got a crush on you.”

What????

“When the pictures from the wedding came in every time she saw you she said……..oh there’s Will.  I love Will.”

Oh, geez, Maggie.  Really???

Will gives Maggie shit when she deserves it.  He’s smart, funny, a good friend and a ten on the cute meter.  What’s not to like about him?

Before dinner when we were catching up on his last year of med school, he told me he reads my blog every day.  It’s in his favorites.  Your favorites?   Oh my.

I have a crush on every one of my daily readers.  As for Will the Friend, I hope one day that he meets a girl who falls crazy in love with him and thinks he hung the moon………..and that I’m there to celebrate.

Spending five years on the east coast was a gift from the relocation gods.  Mark worked for the NIH for those years, and since we knew we wouldn’t end up living there permanently we crammed everything we could into our stay.  My favorite place was Arlington Cemetery.  I never failed to be in awe.  I LOVED Rehobeth Beach in Delaware and even though driving over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge scared the bejeezits out of me we went often.  We saw the White House, Monticello, Mt. Vernon, Annapolis, Harper’s Ferry, Assateague and Chincoteague.  We saw the monuments more times than I could count and you really must see them at night as the quiet of the dark gives them special meaning.

Mark loved the the civil war battlefields.  We saw several but we’re especially close to Antietam.  I didn’t get into it as much as he did until we went there.  When you saw how close the North and the South were shooting cannons at each other………..well, dear God it’s a wonder anybody lived.  It is hallowed sacred ground.

In the last few days, I’ve seen the trailer of the Lincoln movie that Steven Spielberg made that is coming out in November.  When my sister and her husband came to town we went to the Ford Museum and the boarding house across the street where he died.  It’s surreal to be standing in the place where Lincoln was shot.  Besides seeing the clothes that John Wilkes Booth was wearing when he was captured there were artifacts like a letter from a fourteen year old boy to his mom and dad.  A soldier at fourteen.

This video is almost like the movie in my head when I went to all those places.

This is a video I came across via another blog.  This woman was a Russian ballet dancer and at 95, exercises every day with a routine she and her mother came up with long before there were exercise classes, gym memberships or yoga studios. 

I think she is lovely, the video was well-done and I need to stretch.  Every day.

Simplicity, work and enjoyment.

I’ve been on the new job for nearly a month and it’s about what I expected.  Long stretches of dullness, aching legs and feet, flurries of activity, credit card machines not working, thirty boxes of inventory coming in one day.

A day in the life of a shopgirl.

When I went on an interview this summer for an office job I knew that I could not do that.  I knew I’m the kind of girl that needs to keep moving during the day and putting me in a chair behind a desk would be like eight hours of time-out. 

When you never know who will walk through the door, the potential to meet somebody interesting is present on every shift.  Today we had a lovely woman in from Joplin, Missouri.

That Joplin.

We asked her how the town is doing.  How rebuilding was coming along.  She told us of a friend who got picked up three different times by that tornado and landed upside down inside a car.  Not only did she live……she remembers the entire thing.  That you can see clear down blocks where businesses used to be and there is absolutely nothing.  That the hospital will not be rebuilt in the same place because it was too close to the other one in town and they cannot risk another tornado taking out both.   That while one hospital was destroyed the other one had dozens of severely injured patients coming in with no electricity and a week before they had running water again.  That in her lifetime she will never see her town resemble anything close to what it was.

That on any day she is a combination of sad, lucky and grateful.

On this day, I was happy to be a shopgirl once again.  To hear customers stories, to be reminded that it’s all fleeting, to know that despite what one wears attitude always makes the girl.