Loose Strife

I don’t really know why, because I hardly did anything, but I’m trying to remember the series of events during our trip to Virginia and it’s not quite all there. I checked my camera; didn’t take many pictures either.
I drove Laura and the girls down to Annandale on Friday. We stayed with her parents as usual. Joe had smoked a heap of barbeque, so I was happy, but other than that I don’t remember Saturday. Lots of visitors on Sunday — friends from college, friends of the family, and family, too, of course. I can’t recall the details, just the sense.
It’s a wonderful thing to watch Laura interact with everyone: the wit and humor easily roll. That’s something that just doesn’t happen at home. Lively repartee is something that, for the most part, faded from our daily lives years ago. You know each other’s thoughts, one-liners and jokes, opinions on news and arts and so on. And this blog clearly reveals that I’m about as dry and humorless as one can be. (See? I can’t even think of a joke to describe my lack of wit.) So I’ve always loved being out with Laura with others. I can revel in the humor and the quirkiness. It reminds me how lucky I am that she picked someone as dull as me.
I wondered how people perceived Laura’s condition. From my vantage Laura has been stable for a while now although I’m aware of every little struggled gulp of water, stumble, mumble, and stolen 40 winks. I don’t know if others are startled or relieved and I haven’t asked. I did ask my sister whether Laura had changed since she saw her about a week earlier. The answer was yes: more tired and frail. I probably don’t see these longer term changes well as it happens gradually.
The best part of our trip was Laura’s disappearance on Tuesday. We had planned to drive back to Massachusetts, but late Monday night Laura told me that it had suddenly occurred to her that she wanted to take her sister Elena out to tea at the Ritz and splurge and spend time with just each other. It was foolish and frivolous, she said, but she thought she would regret not doing it more than doing it. So on Tuesday morning Elena dropped her four kids off with my two and they disappeared, driving towards downtown. Nobody asked any questions.
I thought they’d return in the afternoon, but around dinner time I got a call from Elena asking “if I knew that Laura wasn’t planning to come home?” And so it became a sort of Thelma and Louise adventure. We bunked all the Shac kids with my kids for a big slumber party at Natalie and Joe’s and wondered when we might actually see the moms again. I still don’t know what all they did, which seems appropriate for a pair of sisters on the lam. Joey and Lily were both thrilled at the thought of their mothers not coming home, staying out late, and having fun together. “Maybe they’ll get room service!!” Joey shouted with a huge smile.
When I read what I just wrote it sounds all unremarkable, but at the time there was a sense of the bizarre. I’d say the unspoken feeling among the adults was that the escape was odd and a logistics hassle (the travel delay, school, food, sleep, visitors, work), but who was going to deny Laura’s wish? And it was really not a problem. Dave Shac and I half expected we’d get a phone call from Charleston or some other faraway place the next morning, but Laura and Elena returned home mid-morning and we hit the road for Massachusetts soon after.
I hope she keeps it up.