Archive: September 2006

This past weekend held a car trip to Connecticut, the uncomfortable experience of sharing a bed in my parents’ house, and the wedding of one of my high school friends. With the cake and chocolate favors that come with the typical wedding also came these important life lessons:

• High-heeled shoes will always sink in the mud, no matter how stable you feel on solid ground.
  I had to wear pretty shoes to the wedding, which meant heels. When dealing with an outdoor ceremony like we were, after an almost-monsoon the night before, there’s bound to be sinkage, but not just for me. The bridesmaids’ pre-chosen silver kitten heels sank ever deeper as the ceremony went on, and they were encrusted with a not-so-pretty layer of gunk for the rest of the night.
• When you only know one side of the bridal party, the receiving line is just weird.
  It’ll even be weird if you say “congratulations” to everyone you don’t know, which is the sage advice we received from the woman in front of us. She looked to be about my mom’s age, so that sounded trustworthy. Until I actually tried it. It was so awkward shake the groom’s parents’ hands and say, “Congratulations!” without so much of a “I know the bride, which is why I’m invited and you don’t know me.” I compensated by making a beeline to the bride, which was as graceful as it sounds. A receiving line is like drugs – just say no.
• Drunk people need friends, and chances are that they’ll find you.
  It was a strange thing to be at a table with people I hadn’t seen in about five years, especially when that table was roughly 18 miles from the dance floor and only half of our tablemates bothered to attend the reception. We made small talk with the other couple at the table, but then distraction came in the form of quasi-friends from high school who had had a little too much. We’ll just call them Drum and Flute from my marching band days (every introduction I made that night was, “JG, this is so-and-so, and he or she played so-and-so instrument in the band…”), and JG and I were their best friends. They told us so. Drum also told us why he didn’t want to get married: “I just have an issue with committing to a date. I’ve been living with my girlfriend for three years, but I just can’t commit to an actual day. My mom hates that.” Flute explained about her sister who is “pregnant with a 41-year-old guy. They’re married, and we don’t like him. Yeah, she’s 20.” Whoa. Nice seeing you guys, too. We’ll totally keep in touch. Don’t ever change.
• If you couldn’t dance like that in high school, you still can’t.
  In one impulsive moment, I allowed myself to be dragged onto the dance floor while Usher’s “Yeah” was playing. As I dropped my wrap onto my chair, I remember thinking, “How do I dance to this?” And then I was on the dance floor, in a little circle with some girls, standing stock still. Don’t get me wrong – I very much enjoy dancing to standards with JG. But this sort of free-form thing has never been for me. I looked stiff and uncoordinated because, well, I was. It was like I had never left high school and I had an eerie sense of déjà vu. My look of discomfort prompted my bridesmaid friend to proclaim, “The worst thing about high school dances was that there was no alcohol. Then you had all your inhibitions and you could see exactly how stupid you looked!” Um, yes. That was the biggest problem with high school dances.

While eating corn on the cob…

RA: Don’t you think it’s weird that these corn holder things are always shaped like corn?
JG: … What else would they be shaped like?
RA: Mm, traffic cones! Or maybe pencils?
JG: Um.
RA: Come on, you do one!
JG: Golf clubs?
RA: Wouldn’t that be too whippy?
JG: I’m not playing this game anymore.

Further research has turned up an exception to the corn-shaped corn holders, but I feel like they’re kind of high on the creepy scale.

When the events of September 11 occurred, my mom commented that I was talking about it like she and her friends did when John F. Kennedy was killed: what they were doing, where they were, how they heard about it, and how they watched the tape over and over. This is my September 11 story, perhaps not inspirational or notable, but mine.

That day, I was a freshman in college, and it was my second Tuesday of classes. I was reading for my first class in a student center when I caught the morning’s headlines from an overhead television set, and Katie Couric appeared suddenly to announce that the first tower had been hit by a plane. I couldn’t stay for the rest of the report, but soon after I arrived at class, another girl came in with the news that the second tower had been hit, but we had no idea what was going on other than that. My next course was interrupted by a female professor running in and frantically scrawling on the blackboard, “Class cancelled due to emergency in Washington, D.C.” and then racing out without a word. We looked at our elderly professor, who said calmly, “We will finish our class.” And we did.

When I returned to my dorm, my roommate and neighbors were gathered around our tiny television, watching footage replay. For the first time, I saw the planes hitting the towers, the devastating collapse, and the countless people on the ground. Then there came word of the plane crashes in Pennsylvania and D.C. I was shaken. All of the news I had missed during my three hours of classes came crashing to me in waves of deeply saddening images. The skyline of the city where I had spent every holiday since I could remember was billowing smoke where there should have been two solid, steel buildings. I couldn’t call my parents; the phone lines were so blocked up with however many calls. So we sat by the phone and watched the news for hours.

That night, I went to a vigil with several thousands of students, and the show of unity and candlelight was calming to me. I felt distinctly small and vulnerable because the collapse of the towers meant more than the failure of steel and concrete; it was the uncertainty of institutions I had assumed to be stable, even indestructible. The sheer animosity of the act was chilling, and I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that people on these planes faced their mortality in their coach seats while employees in their offices had no time to say goodbye. I found out later that two daughters of my parents’ friends had died that day at their jobs in the towers. They were my sister’s age.

My parents visited the following weekend because it was intended to be Freshman Parents’ Weekend. They expected to watch me in the halftime show at the football game, but it was cancelled as a sign of respect. Instead, we walked through a memorial ribbon garden set up in front of the library. Thousands of yellow ribbons, bearing messages from students, faculty, and even my parents, fluttered in the wind. Even now, the library looks somewhat empty to me without the ribbons, which have since been taken down and saved for posterity.

Five years later, I made my commute under an appropriately cloudy sky, as if everything was grieving. I will call a friend to wish her a happy birthday; she hates to bring it up in the midst of everything else going on, and people tend to forget. I’ll make dinner for JG and me. I’ll watch the ceremonies and speeches. And I’ll remember where I was.

I used to love the first day of school. It was the signal to start over, stock up on new supplies, and buy one or two new outfits. Most importantly, it was the start of fall – the best season! In my New England childhood, that meant jumping in piles of rust-toned leaves (and watching out for the occasional slug), eating Crockpot meals like beef stew and pot roast, and the annual farewell to my pollen-induced allergies. Hooray!

Well, my mid-Atlantic leaves are still green, and my allergies haven’t quite gone away yet, but this weekend, despite the 70-degree weather and the sound of lawnmowers in the background, is when fall starts for me, and here’s why:

Today: The first University of Delaware football game
Thanks to the generosity of JG’s parents, we have season tickets to go see the University of Delaware football team, and today is the season opener against West Chester University. The game will probably be a blowout because WCU isn’t even in the same division as we are, but it’s a traditional rivalry, and it’s nice to start out the season with a win. I didn’t enjoy football at all before I met JG; as far as I was concerned, the football field was primarily for marching band practice, as I’ve implied before. When I had to give up the band in college due to schedule conflicts, JG and I took advantage of the free student section of the football games – awful seats behind the goal post – and he taught me how to watch the game. At first, I just watched the scoreboard and listened to the announcer, and honestly, from that viewpoint, you can’t tell whether the guys go 5 yards or 50. Soon, though, I began to notice that the same guy usually ran or threw, and I kept hearing the same names over the loudspeaker for completed passes or blitzes. In the weeks before UD won the Division 1-AA National Championship in 2003, JG and I were at every playoff game, even when we had to chip snow and ice off our bleacher seats, and I was as good a football fan as any. Tonight, I’m looking forward to seats on the home side (such luxury!), and I’ll be able to see my friends in the band as well as tell how far plays run. Plus, we’re bringing a sort of tailgate dinner, and there’s always a chance that we’ll run into the mascot in the parking lot!

Tomorrow: The 21st Annual Mushroom Festival
The farms in our little town in Pennsylvania produce half of the world’s mushrooms (I should note here that I love the little fungi and JG has grown to tolerate them), and there is a festival each year to celebrate our major export. It’s always the weekend after Labor Day, and it is a quintessential small town activity, except that it’s infused with mushrooms. There’s an antique car parade, a rock climbing wall for kids, animals up for adoption from the SPCA, and stalls upon stalls of free giveaways and samples from local businesses. The town closes off its main street around the square, and signs in the periphery read, “Mushroom Festival 9/9-9/10. Suggest another route.” Last year at this time, the offer that JG and I made on our house had just been accepted, so we decided to go to the festival to get a taste of what our new town would be like. We paid five bucks for parking and ambled around, checking out the old cars, watching street performers, and buying a snack of the best fried mushrooms caps we’ve ever had. We stumbled upon a used bookstore that was having its grand opening that day, and we came away with handfuls of dollar novels and random other reading material. The Mushroom Festival is special to JG and me, and I can’t wait to walk up and catch the cooking demonstrations from area chefs tomorrow afternoon. This time, I’ll bring my camera and hopefully get shots of all of the random mushroom-shaped paraphernalia that showed up last year, everything from lawn sculptures to bird houses to candle holders. I’ll definitely be on the lookout for those fried mushrooms, too.