Truly happy hour. Well, more like four, but yeah.
2004-12-10 at 10:46 p.m.
I'm at the point of my life where I think I've finally approached Having a Ritual. Any other time in my life when I thought I had a ritual, it's been disavowed pretty much as soon as its been identified. This time however it appears to be true.I have a Friday Night Happy Hour.
Does this plus Andrew's darts league and my crock pot make us hopeless? Hopelessly middle aged? Just Plain Old?
Probably the most condemning part: I don't care. Because the best part of Friday Night Happy Hour is that it happens if I'm not there.
God, that sounds really arrogant, but what I really mean is this. I couldn't go last week (bad bad cold) and the week before, I think I was just stressed or maybe it was Thanksgiving or whatever. Something was happening. But this week we Just Went, like we knew it was happening, Andrew and I. And it was! Folks were already there, and then folks showed up after us, and people left when they felt tired and showed up when they wanted to and it was a revolving door and almost all my friend in P-town were there!
It's a ritual!
Nicole's dad once told me that it takes at least a year before a new city ever felt like capital-H home. Portland has often felt like home, and considering we've been here two years now, hey, good, right? It's almost never NOT felt like home, if that's not too many negatives to ever make sense to a non-freak. But for real, in a way Chicago and even Northfield never really did, this really feels like HOME, like a place where I am, where I should be, where WE are a WE and there is an US and there is a community of people I don't have to see every day or call every day or email every day where we know we'll be there for each other. I can just SHOW UP and it's like I've both never left and like I'm brand new and have Great Stories and How Am I and How Are We?
Tonight I heard about Bec's new internship (yeah, you go girl!) and Eryn's job and Karen's student teaching and Em's wee baby and the darts team and Dan hocked a loogie on an SUV with a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker and I didn't have to be ON or anything, it all was just--we all have crazy different lives but all care really hardcore about how everyone's doing. We don't all have to be student teachers or in urban planning or interior design or computer programming or in federal parole or... who am I leaving out? That's how diverse we are. And we all just--are invested in each other because we care.
GOD, could we all feel this way? Always? About each other?
How fucking lucky am I? Are we?
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