"America's present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration."
There's an apocryphal story floating around that Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld pitched Jerry's eponymous situation comedy to NBC's executives as a "show about nothing." I suppose that's what this blog presents this morning; just a meander through a weekend of not doing much.
Saturday morning we awoke at the condo to gloom and wind and rain.
No, it didn't look like this at all. That photo was shot at sunrise the morning before.
It's always a luxury when P isn't forced to roll out of bed before dawn and pull herself together for work. We lounged around in PJs, drank coffee, talked, and read the paper online. I'd originally figured I would go to the office and catch up on a couple things while Peg got a pedicure, but when she decided her evening sartorial plan included closed toed shoes, and my depositions this morning cancelled late Friday, my motivation to sit here at this desk by myself over the weekend evaporated.
Instead, we decided to make it Christmas here after all, and go get a tree. But first we made ourselves feel virtuous by slogging up Highway 77 to Planet Fitness for a quick circuit; from there, we drove in the rain over to the Boys and Girls Club Christmas Tree Lot, the same place I've bought my tree for something like thirty years, to find something suitably short and skinny for 407.
The place was a complete miasma in the pouring rain. My friend Todd, the most civic minded guy I've ever met, was volunteering his time working the lot. He helped us find a tree and bagged it for us, and soon we were back at the condo to drop the tree in the storage locker to dry out before we brought it inside.
After a quick shower we decided to ride over to Bayou Joe's for a little delicious fried goodness for lunch, along with a couple IPAs, watching it rain across Massalina Bayou and listening to the drops ping on the tin roof. We caught up with a server who's been there almost as long as I've been in Panama City. "Where've y'all been?", she asked. A long story, that one.
The IPAs proved quite helpful for the next stop, wading into a sea of cars and unhappy, wet shoppers at Home Goods to buy Christmas decorations. Peg sent me over to Wal Mart to find a stand and some lights (Peg hates Wal Mart with a purple passion, while I merely dislike it), after we were almost struck by lightning in the parking lot. God's way of keeping us on our toes, I guess.
We spent the equivalent of my biweekly pay as a lieutenant in the Air Force on decorations, and brought our booty home to decorate the now-dry tree and watch Georgia stink it up in the SEC championship; that is, after a short nap in response to the soporiphic call of the continuing rain. In a sign that I've reached an advanced level of emotional maturity as I approach sixty, I didn't throw a temper tantrum at the Dawgs' defeat. It would seem ungrateful, after all, to complain about the team's first loss in something like two years.
Sooner than we would've liked, we changed clothes and dragged ourselves out the door to attend our very first Krewe of Dominique Youx Christmas Party at Barataria Bay, their storage barn and party facility over on the beach. It started a little slow for us--we didn't know many folks there--but soon P ran into a colleague from work who's married to this year's king of the krewe, and my law partner and his brother, a judge, arrived in full Christmas regalia. We ended up having a nice time, and were home early and dead asleep before ten.
The next morning the rain continued, and we again lounged about in PJs reading and talking until, after brunching on Peg's first attempt at coddled eggs (a success, but P concluded more trouble than it was worth), we headed to Publix to shop for P's planned menu for the week. While we were there we saw two old acquaintances from church--thankfully, the one who thinks I have horns and a tail didn't seem to notice us. Then P directed us back to Home Goods for a clean-up list of the things we neglected to pick up on Saturday. The parking lot and store were again an absolute mob scene, and every male in the place (we comprised maybe a quarter or less of the shoppers) pushed a cart with a look of abject defeat while his significant other gleefully pondered the bargains. We saw the nice lady who decorated our condo there, and talked about her husband's upcoming retirement. P and I have known these folks for nearly twenty years now. They're like family, in positive and sometimes not-so-positive ways. They both went to Bama, so I avoided the topic of football.
We decided the weather had given us a free pass to go home and lie on the couch eating popcorn and watching Christmas specials and a movie. There was Rudolph, and Kris Kringle, and the Little Drummer Boy, and a singing and dancing Scrooge. After maybe the finest spaghetti and meat sauce I've ever had (this is P's recipe, after all), we hit the pillow and P was already snoring softly before I could ask if she wanted to watch something on the tablet. Instead I dialed up the kindle version of a wonderful Russian novel a friend gave me in paperback a couple months ago, and read in the darkness until I could barely keep my eyes open.
It was such a normal weekend, so unremarkable. So wonderful. P and I dreamed of this once upon a time, but it all was blown away in a storm and a pandemic and this year of deaths and yet another hurricane. Just getting to spend a little time together, to shop and to laugh on the couch at my suggested edits to the Christmas specials (watching Kris Kringle escape the endless repression and whiny demands for toys in Sombertown by moving to the North Pole, we came up with the idea of "An Ayn Rand Christmas", with the North Pole as Gault's Gulch and Santa telling the little leeches to go buy their own damned toys), was all more pleasurable than this post can convey. Losing "normal" then getting it back, sort of, has only made us appreciate it that much more, which is a blessing in all this tumult and loss.
Jerusalem was a crumbling semi-ghost town when the sojourners returned and Nehemiah rebuilt the wall. But God's people loved it all the same.
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