2001-07-13
I told my best friend, who lives in Chicago, that I'd like to visit her sometime this summer. You know, while I still can. While I'm still just one person, or two people contained in one body. She said she'd give it some thought but that her schedule is really insane for the foreseeable future. She called me this morning to say that she'd come up with a good weekend for me to visit. This weekend. She prefaced it by saying she had a crazy idea, and I said Try me. As happened back when Kymm and I cooked up the scheme for me to fly to New York on a day's notice to see her play, I hesitated to broach the subject with B. (He likes having me around, it seems. Which, considering the alternatives, is a happy state of affairs.) He encouraged me to go. Yay! So, off I go. * B is a bit of a worrier. He imagines all kinds of awful things happening and I tend to think he's slightly nuts but try to keep this to myself. Yesterday, though, something he's been worrying about for a long time actually happened. The fact that it did was sort of my fault. We have two big oak trees in our front yard, many of the limbs of which are dead. He parks his 1969 MG under one these trees. He's been saying for a long time that we need to have the dead limbs removed. And we did have this done once two or three years back. It was time to do it again, though, before a big one fell on the house or the car or the mailman or one of us. And I made a good-faith effort, dialing a bunch of different tree services in the yellow pages, only they all had answering machines and none of them returned my messages. So months passed and the limbs stayed where they were. Yesterday after work I pulled into the driveway and saw a limb lying diagonally from the grass to the door of his car. His car was under a white Tyvek cover and I gingerly touched the spot where the limb lay, praying it had done no damage. Then I went inside and said, "Did you hear the branch fall?" and he said, "What branch?" and I braced myself. It dented the top of the door. We had some words. Not too many. I pointed out that he could have arranged for a tree service himself. He pointed out that he's not the homeowner. He calmed down pretty quickly. He wasn't really ever all that het up in the first place. I felt pretty awful. * As I was preparing my lunch in the kitchen at work today the big boss came in with a large white bakery box. He was all excited to show me the chocolate cake he'd just bought to serve some guests over the weekend. I said, "You're showing a pregnant woman cake and not offering her a slice?" He looked contrite. Later in the afternoon I had a meeting scheduled with him. He wasn't in his office when I arrived. A few minutes later he showed up with a small white bakery box. "I realized that what I did before was cruel," he said. Inside the box was a miniature version of the cake. What a guy.
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