Friday! Hallelujah!

I asked Bobbie if she would like to take a road trip anywhere in Washington tomorrow to get a look at the lay of the land. She didn’t expect we would go anywhere; she just wants to visit with me, but I said we can do that while I drive, so I think we have settled on a day trip to Mt St Helens tomorrow and to the Seattle Center/Space Needle/Pike Place Market next Saturday. This isn’t in granite yet, but it’s in wet cement, sorta. Things can change. I need a good night’s sleep tonight to be sure I can make it to Mt St Helens and back safely (alert and awake) because I have been busy the past two weekends pretty much non-stop (OHC booth at UPFest on the 4th and Vegas from the 10th-12th) and since Bobbie has been here I can’t seem to call it a night and go to bed at a decent hour. That’s entirely MY fault! She keeps trying to get me into my bedroom at the time I “designate” for shut-eye so I can function at work the next day, but hey… she’ll only be here two weeks and we’re having so much fun, I can’t seem to shut down until I’m just about cross-eyed. So it’s all my fault!

Last night Bobbie played my guitar and pulled out song music from six decades of wonderful music and we sang it all. Then I regaled her with large memorized swatches of dialogue from FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, MAN OF LA MANCHA and THE MUSIC MAN. She never shoulda got me started. She knew most of the same stuff from those shows (the musical parts), so we launched into a stereo version of all of it at eleven at night with the windows and doors wide open - and no one in the neighborhood batted an eyelid or called the police about the caterwauling. (I think they were amazed…) You haven’t lived till you’ve seen us going through the motions of MARIAN THE LIBRARIAN, complete with imaginary book stamping… We had a very good time, can you tell?

“A fiddler on the roof.. Sounds crazy, no? But here, in our little village of Anatevka you might say that every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a decent, simple tune without breaking his neck… You may ask, why do we stay up there if it’s so dangerous? We stay because Anatevka is our home. And how do we keep our balance? That, I can tell you in one word: Tradition! Because of our traditions, everyone knows who he is and what G-d expects him to do… For example, we always keeps our heads covered and we always wear prayer shawls. You may ask, how did this tradition get started? I’ll tell you: I don’t know… but it’s a tradition!”

And then we’d launch into the song, “Who, day and night, must scramble for a living, feed his wife and children, say his daily prayers? And who has the right, as master of the house, to have the final word at home? The PAPA! The PAPA!” And right down the line for all family members… That led to Yente the matchmaker, and Sunrise, Sunset…

Well, you see, there was no way we could go to bed in the middle of a smash musical. And when we ended that reenactment, we started on THE MUSIC MAN, and on MAN OF LA MANCHA. Those aren’t musicals you can go to bed in the middle of, either…

And so it went. We had a wonderful time! And I’m cross-eyed here at work this morning but my brain still seems to be functioning just fine so no one has noticed I walk funny…

We’ve been in stitches and in tears several times. It’s cathartic for me to re-live aspects of my association with De and Carolyn at length, which gets Bobbie misty, and her emotions set me free to mist right along with her! Truly, it’s very good for me. I was so busy being strong for everyone around me during the final months of Des’ life (and even before that with my Mom’s own terminal condition) that I pushed aside my need to cry for myself when I should have… so this is very, very good (and totally affordable!) therapy. Bobbie keeps apologizing for bringing me back to those “thrilling, chilling days of yesterday” when life was good and then pretty awful (as De started to go downhill physically), but if I still have tears inside, they need to come out, and I’m certainly with company who understands… so it’s just terrific! The tears don’t last long – we just hug and then say something silly to “break the spell” so we can laugh through the tears. De would like that. He’d say, “Don’t get stuck in the tears portion of our association! I’m free now – you be free, too, you two!”

The cats are doting on Bobbie. Even Ashley, the shy one, is slowly coming around (you can tell, because his slinking has stopped for the most part) because he sees Poppy and Archie being groomed and chin-tickled and he’s thinking, “Well, she hasn’t killed and eaten them, yet, so maybe she’s okay… Hmmm..” When he finally makes her acquaintance, he will wonder why he waited so long! But timid cats just don’t seem to “get” that not everything in the world that’s new is not deadly. Archie immediately “scouts out” a new prospect to see if he can garner some TLC, and Poppy doesn’t hide and is amenable to meeting people, but Ashley is like a critter shot out of a cannon whenever someone new appears in his world – he secludes himself in the bathroom cupboard at warp seven and comes out only hesitantly to eat and to spy and see if everyone else is still safe despite the “intrusion” of alien life forms. Poor guy. Sweetest cat you ever met, but with the IQ of a doughnut…