Friday, Oct. 24, 2003 - 9:00 a.m.
Greetings,
This morning when I opened the front door in Tommy’s Chamber, I was struck by a watery world of amorphous fog. Tendrils of wispy white drifted all around me. I could see the fog in liquid form ticking against the porch light.
As we drove through fog thick as pea soup, I thought of Jack the Ripper and London in the fall of 1888 and how easy it must have been to disappear into the rippling fog without a trace.
We got our hot chai tea (me), iced mocha (Tommy) at PJs and settled at a table outside. A werewolf leered from the window about our heads.
We saw the Magazine Street bus chug to a stop across the street and I said, “Oh, look, Tommy, it’s us!”
And he said, “Oh, yeah. NOT!” And threw a pointed look at Kharis parked nearby.
Then we went off into memories of walking into misterjohn’s Magazine Street apartment to find him glowering over his coffee mug waiting for us. And on days when we’d open the front door and hear the bus coming and have to run to bus stop, misterjohn would always make a comment along the lines of, “You know, I got up at 4:30 this morning, drank 3 pots of coffee and played 18,000 games of Solitaire on my computer and yet, here I am, still RUNNING for the bus!”
And he’d sit in front of us on the bus, the back of his neck all red and he’d be John Bear until we got to PJ’s where he could relax with a cup of coffee and a cigarette and expound on plans for his life or the weekend or the workday in general.
As we were climbing back into Kharis to drive to the Westblank, the car door hit my cup and a blurt of hot chai tea went straight down the front of my shirt. I was trying to hurry into the car so I could pull out before the light across the street changed.
Just call me grace under pressure!
I’m still drinking the last of the chai. Yum.
Tonight after work I’m going grocery shopping and then going home to soak in the tub for a while before making Hamburger Helper and watching some sort of horror movie. Maybe an episode of X-Files or Millennium.
Tomorrow I am sleeping late, drinking Pumpkin Spice coffee when I finally do get up, and then cleaning Crescentwood in time for the Pylon meeting that night.
It’s Kristen and Austin’s first anniversary this weekend so we’ll celebrate a bit with them afterwards. I can’t believe it was a year ago already that I put on my mask and drank about ten gallons of chartreuse in the penthouse suite at the Doubletree on the river.
Their wedding kicked off a series of interesting events that transpired through the rest of the year and into the beginning of this one.
Little did I know.
Well, happy Friday everyone!
Until next time,
Olrun
