Good morning from this beautiful loft space in yet another Airbnb this month. Chilly morning, and I’m up earlier than the others, so an entry it is!
I think this might be the coolest Airbnb I’ve stayed in yet! It’s a former tiny little bungalow on a teeny tiny angular lot in the middle of the cool part of the city. It’s been modified and modernized, and Martini and I are sharing the lofty upstairs that’s almost a whole house to ourselves!
The only issue is, there’s not a lot of insulation, and apparently, the husband downstairs thinks I walk like an elephant, which is bullshit because I’m tiptoe-ing around quieter than I’ve ever tiptoed! Ha.
Did I tell you, I’m staying for a week with my childhood best friend and her husband in this Airbnb? They came for a weeklong vacation to go to the fair and do fun stuff while I came for that plus all of my doc appointments next week.
My friend, let’s give her a name…Sally (when we were little she looked just like Charlie Brown’s little sister, Sally - I mean, exactly!!), and her husband - let’s call him Pig Pen… not because he’s dirty, but more of a verbal Pig Pen because he honestly won’t STFU - are decent roomies. I go to bed much earlier than they do and I wake up long before they do, but it’s fine. I literally just say, “Whelp. I’m going to bed.” And then I do.
So far, the visit has been okay. Not the best, but fine. I do love my friend, but I wouldn’t ever choose her to be my friend today. We are far and beyond completely different. And that’s okay! I am loving the stories of yore (when I can remember the people involved, ha!), and I am in full support of listening to the family drama because I practically lived with her and her family when we were in middle school (junior high) and high school.
Her family has always had drama. I remember as a kid it scared me yet fascinated me. Coming from what I thought was a Leave it to Beaver kind of “perfect” home (though now I realize it wasn’t) to her absolute CHAOS of a family was exciting to me. Except for the abuse. There was quite a bit of violence and honestly, child abuse happening in that family, which was terrifying.
A couple of years ago, while her mom was going through cancer treatment, Sally’s father was murdered by a homeless person. It’s a long story - her dad was quite honestly an absolute dick, lacking in moral character and integrity, but that’s a whole other story of which I may write more. Anyway, he was working in a guard shack (in his EIGHTIES), I guess as an information guide or something to this gated kind of community and some guy came along and stabbed him to death.
Shortly thereafter, the mom died of her illness.
It’s all a very, very sad and horrific story, and Sally is obviously still working through it, and her two sisters are too. So there are stories of the girls clinging together and then utter estrangement. Right now, two of the sisters are not speaking to the third, and the stories of greed and craziness are coming out.
I’ve been listening and working very hard to be supportive, but then Pig Pen comes along and adds his two cents and sometimes I just want to walk away from the guy. I do see what Sally sees in him. He has a lot of the same dickish ways her dad did. But I will say that the guy completely loves her and they’ve now been married for 26 years, so they are doing really well together.
Sally keeps asking me if I remember so-and-so, and I don’t. I mean, I do remember most of them, but a lot of them I don’t remember as they were obscure folks that maybe we went to high school with but they were older or younger or whatever. Anyway, she lives very close to where we went to high school and I left that place nearly forty years ago, so she still knows all the old people and has all of this gossip about them, and I’m just like, “uh huh, uh huh” and nodding my head and the stories are getting so old. I don’t remember/know these people!!
We also had some bad weather yesterday so couldn’t do the big thing we’d planned to do yesterday and ended up doing boring stuff and ordering in and just jabbering away. We did have a lovely fire in the fire pit last night, but by 9pm, I was absolutely completely talked out and sick of listening to Pig Pen rant, so I was like, nighty-night!
And I carried my sleeping dog upstairs and went to bed.
Now this morning, I’m sipping coffee as the sun slowly rises. I’ll put my walking gear on soon and take Martini for a lovely walk in the cool air and then we’ll pile in Sally and Pig Pen’s rental car to go see my mom and dad and celebrate my mom’s birthday and my birthday together!! Whee…should be fun. I do know that my mom is looking forward to seeing my high school BFF (and my dad especially is too!). We all spent a lot of time together when Sally and I were friends and they remember those crazy days quite vividly (or at least somewhat, ha!).
So let’s see how this goes!!
XO,
GS
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