I’m back in Miami now, having successfully navigated Heathrow Airport with Tom and Ashley and made it back home to the island. I’m writing this from Marah’s house; I’m babysitting as we speak, actually. After I post this I plan to order a pizza, watch Growing Pains, and call the boy I’m going steady with long distance while the baby sticks his fingers in the electrical outlet. Also, I am wearing a side ponytail and Keds without socks.
It’s sunny and warm but not too warm here and I have thus far spent all my time since arriving with my mom and the Key Girls. Yesterday we had Key Girl Christmas and we exchanged presents and I shared one of my precious tubes of Jaffa Cakes with everyone. Some people bring back actual souvenirs when they travel; apparently I just bring back mass-produced sweets. While we were waiting to board the plane the other day I was saddened by the fact that I had some extra pence in my pocket and that there were, for some reason, steak-flavored potato chips in the vending machine right near me which were tragically unavailable because of course the machine didn’t work. There were a couple other machines in the immediate vicinity which, of course, I could see but couldn’t get to without inciting the wrath of various steely-eyed British Airways employees. It was very sad. I was so curious as to why anyone would bother to flavor a vegetable with meat and now I fear I will never know. I have only my digestive biscuits to ease the pain.
My last couple of days in London were very nice indeed. I did some more touristy stuuf (Ate fish and chips! In the pub! Saw the Tower of London! From the pub!) and went over to the lovely Mara (I know a Marah and a Mara, isn’t that weird?) and Lee’s house for “roast dinner” which is exactly what it sounds like and involved my first experience with parsnips. How one manages to reach the age of twenty-nine-and-three-quarters without eating parsnips eludes me but all I can say is that even though my mom is from the Midwest I grew up in an area largely bereft of a root-vegetable-eating culture. Anyway, it was totally fun to hang out with Mara and Lee and their cat and theirs was the first Christmas tree I saw this season. We don’t have one at my mom’s house; this year she got a little tree-shaped rosemary bush and we’ve sort of piled the presents around that. I like it, but it’s true it’s not immediately evocative of the holidays in the way that a tree with lights and everything is.
Anyway, yes, Key Girl Christmas, which is something we started doing around the time we all went away to college. This year we all did very well in terms of giving and receiving presents; we’ve had times where we all gave pretty bad gifts (“a poster of a baby orangutang underneath the words ‘Hang In There’ in crazy seventies font? Gee, thanks.”) We gave presents and I told everyone about my week and Ashley gave us a fashion show of all the clothes she bought with her robust British money and then we came back here to Marah’s house and ate the delicious dinner her husband made us and played with the babies and generally hung around being social. It was nice. I’m not entirely sure when the four of us will be together again as there are a lot of transitions afoot for all of us so it was good just to spend that relaxed time together, even if it was only for an evening.
I was at the park with Marah and her baby this afternoon…man, the park near my house must have some sort of beacon on it or something because I swear there were eight hundred kids there all at the same time and I wondered if people would take me for some sort of crazed childless park-hanger-outer…and thinking about these friendships I’ve had with these women for twenty years now. As Marah and I went over to Sir Pizza post-park I was thinking about all the time I spent with her and Manya and Ashley as kids…we carpooled together and were in classes together and play practice and Sunday school and then just for good measure we’d hang out on the weekends too…and I wondered what did we talk about? My friendships now, including those with the Key Girls, are based on hanging out for specific amounts of time, usually for specific purposes: karaoke, goat cheese-oriented lunch-and-gossip, knitting. I so rarely hang out anymore, I’ve noticed; I hardly ever just show up at a friend’s house with a book and my bathing suit just prepared to spend the entire day doing nothing. I need to do that more. That would probably necessitate moving to the ABL though; they are the best hanger-outers in all the land.
Reminiscences aside, my time here has thus far been the usual amalgam of deep laziness, rips in the space time continuum (“Why is there a HUGE BUILDING where the kickball field at the school used to be?”), and evidence that I’m In Florida Now. Yesterday on the way to do a little Christmas shopping? Had to stop because a random peacock was crossing the street. Hearing Spanish on the street, eating picadillo and plantanos, wearing sandals, seeing the little green parrots fly overheads: I’m In Florida Now! I plan to spend the rest of my time hanging out with mom and with whatever Key Girls want to, taking pictures, and enjoying the slight disconnect from the rest of my life that a spate of time on the island always brings.