My helmet may be too loose, too old and basically unsafe, but it has great acoustics. I discovered that I can sing at the top of my lungs while we’re riding up 680 and no one can hear me but me. I can sing, for example, “Anna Begins” over and over, putting the chorus in a different place every time and occasionally repeating the part about shaking and shuddering for days many times in a row when I can’t remember what comes next. Nobody knows. Nobody can even see my mouth moving, except when my helmet slides down over my eyes so that the window is somewhere around my chin.
Last night we had a meeting of the musical. That’s how I always say it and grammar be damned. It was the same old wonderful, with a lot of impassioned arguments about whether they had Draino in the 1920’s and whether gummy worms could be substituted for footage of killer centipedes. (No and yes.)
Warning: the rest of this is probably going to slightly embarass most of you.
The Lad was there too of course. I love watching him move around a room. I like to see his spatial relationship to people and furniture when he walks and sits and flings me across a tiled floor like a manic swing dancer. I like the way he intensely concentrates on everything. I like that he will throw the ball for the dog until the dog is tired, not because he likes the dog (he hates the dog, and all drooling unhygenic mammals including toddlers and coma patients) but because he likes to beat the dog at its own game.
It’s November now. We met in September, but it was around November that I started to notice there was something rather extraordinary sitting across the classroom from me, being a caustic smartass to everyone. We met in 1992, so that makes this our tenth anniversary of mutual esteem.
Comments are back now, by the way, for the nonce. Let’s face it, I can’t quit anytime. I need an intervention in a big way.
27 Responses to Happy anniversary, Lad.