When you get a call from you best friend, who is spending 10 days with her family, and under the din of 6 people trying to talk over each other and screaming children you hear a ghost in the connection begging (in a silent and breathless way) "Save meee" you go. Tho leaving town on a Friday after work and arriving downstate on the same day is a mathematic vehicularly impossibility
Amtrak has managed it every time. I love the train so I happily take the train down on a friday night and let Vehicularly chic Big Daddy follow the next day with the puppy. As far as travel goes I think it is the best. It takes longer than air travel but the seats are bigger and you can move about all you want. It is about the same as driving but you aren't driving and there is a bar car. Ah the luxuries of a by gone era.
We bordered late then had to wait for the reattaching of the engine so it was at least 50 minutes before I was relaxing in the bar car. But once I'm there that means everything is fine. It's fine by me if you want to role along at a reduced rate of speed thru the quaint little towns, over river and by field as long as we get there tonight. But then we stop and suddenly the bar car fills up with construction workers just off the job. Meet my sweaty new boyfriend...
Nope he is not wearing a shirt, neither were any of his friends.
So I arrive late and apologize profusely to my friend and her dad who also came to pick me up. Some things never change, her parents have been rescuing me as long as they've known me. They didn't seem to taken aback by the 40 min. wait. I was starving when I got there and ate the leftover ribs and Cuban sandwich. This is just the beginning of the biological experiment I performed on myself over the next 2 days: Biscuits and gravy, baked spaghetti, baguettes drenched in olive oil and cheese, BBQ, and of course bourbon. There was also the 6year old wedding cake top (Big Daddy rightly so passed on that saying at least one person should abstain) I still have a gastric pain in my side. Every time she and I are together lately it seems we try to kill each other. We also stayed up into the wee hours of the morning drinking and I got to follow that up with the 6am "thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.... SHRIEK WAIIIIL" wake up call of a 2&1/2 year old above me. This child did nothing but throw tantrums and shriek from the time I got there until I left. I think we all know how I feel about children. But this ones mother must have mated with Satan. The child speaks 3 recognizable words, is unresponsive to discipline AND his name, violent, and spoiled. This was the worst torture I have endured. My best friend asked me to watch him for a moment, knowing full well I would push him off the balcony the first chance I got, too haggard and spent from the family and the cooking and the babysitting she was doing on this vacation to think straight. She looked desperate when I flatly refused. I don't think it occurred to her until later I WAS being responsible by saying no. *Shudder*
I knew why she and her dad seemed so unperturbed by my train being 40 min. late. My respite was going to my mothers house to do chores and I was glad for it. She had told me about the gardening and the sorting and hauling but she hadn't mentioned the gutters. The gutters had forests of 3 inch maple trees growing out of them. She said she would have paid someone to do them but the only person who had offered was a drunk and she didn't want him on the ladder. So it was in a state of sleep deprived-inebriated-hungoverness that I found myself on the roof looking down over the edge happily scooping out the trees and their foul smelling life source of composted water glad for the peace.
