Part the Fourth or Sunday, Sunday
11:04 a.m.
We do, in fact, own a cell phone, a peripheral which we hardly ever use and for which I cannot really justify paying a usage fee every month (even the minimum "emergency" service) because for the most part it sits turned off in the basket that holds napkins on our kitchen counter. However, it has come in very handy when traveling, as in the instance when our rear differential blew up on the 401 or when I had to make contact with umpteen people on my trip to NYC last year, even though every time it rang I didn't know what that strange sound was. I pay through the nose for those calls though.
Anyway, I have discovered that it makes a very handy travel alarm clock. I had it set for 7:30 Sunday morning, hoping to get as much shut-eye as possible after our evening of debauchery (well, someone's evening of debauchery) before we had to meet our old friend Rita for breakfast. When we lived in Ann Arb0r a thousand years ago, we occupied the top half of a house in the backyard of which was a one-bedroom cottage where Rita lived. She had two cats (Callie and Chester) and was then a speech therapist at the university hospital. Later she went back to school and changed her major, becoming a number cruncher instead. We five (Rita, us and the couple downstairs) were like a big family, and I remember many happy dinners around Rita's pine table.
However, at 7 a.m. the telephone rang, two short rings, which woke me up, and I was not able to fall asleep for the remaining half hour. Instead I showered, packed my suitcase, wrote in my paper diary and waited for my menfolk to rouse themselves. We checked out of the hotel and met Rita for breakfast in the lobby restaurant. She had warned us that on Sunday mornings it was impossible to find a table in Ann Arb0r, so this seemed like the best bet. Our waitress (Daisy or Dorothy or Dolores or something) was incredibly cheerful and perky for a Sunday morning. We gorged ourselves on the buffet and caught up with our old friend. She truly has not changed a bit, which is very comforting.
Then we hopped in the repacked car and took the M-14 and I-96 and other roads whose names escape me to visit my dear friend j-leem and her husband dark-knight who are enjoying conjugal bliss in a suburb of Detroit. It was such a delight to see J and to meet Dark whom I had only ever talked to in the chatroom before. J's son has grown about a foot since I saw him last year, but is still as cute and rambunctious as ever. Buddy Boy had his hands full all afternoon, playing with the wee laddie, always losing at whatever the current game was since the boy has a way of changing the rules to his advantage mid-play. I was finally able to divest myself of the wedding present I had been carrying around for days, a gorgeous pottery bowl with a crystalline glaze (an example of crystalline pottery:
J made an incredible lunch for us which we ate in the kitchen of her next-door-neighbour (we shared it with her and her boyfriend too) of lentil soup, steamed butternut squash, an amazing Greek salad, before which she set out some kick-ass appetizers and finished off with a dynamite cheesecake. Buddy Boy was happy. It was hard to say good bye, but we had to tear ourselves away in order to make it to Hubby's home town before nightfall, approximately a four-hour drive.
This time we decided to take the P0rt Hur0n-Sarnia crossing. We just sailed across the BIuewater Bridge towards the Canadian side, but there were long lines of cars and trucks crawling the way we had come. My mother-in-law had supper for us, but we were too late to see my father-in-law in the hospital (he had had knee surgery). I ended up going to bed pretty soon thereafter, but a terrific thunderstorm kept us awake part of the night. It sounded exactly like Giants playing 10-pin in the hills.
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