Juxtapose

My parents are out of town picking up my great aunt so she can stay for a weeklong visit. In the meantime, I've got the three youngest in the family staying over my apartment for the night. So far we've done all the things that are, in Teddy's words, "TOTALLY AWESOME," such as, play Raving Rabbids 2 on the Wii, eat lots of pizza (in Ted's case), eat a giant hamburger club sandwich and a giant plate of fries (in Ray's), and watch Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark. Next up is The Olympics, with more Oreos, chips and salsa, and Sprite.

And, since they're worth repeating, here are two bonus Teds quotes of the night.

Teds: "I wonder what would happen if you REALLY looked into the Ark of the Commerment??? I'd bet you'd die, but your face probably wouldn't melt off like in the movie, I bet..."

Teds: "CASS!!"
Me: "What?"
Teds: "It's gotta be, like, MIDNIGHT right now! We are up SO LATE, maaaan!!"
Tess: "Teddy, it's eight-thirty."

Last Friday we spent the night at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Nashua, NH as a little "staycation" (as Mark says they're calling them these days). It was really only about a half an hour away from our house, but for the purposes of getting out of the house, eating at the hotel restaurant and paying for it by putting it on our room tab.. that was fun. It was worth the money and packing our little bag to do something different and wake up on Saturday morning feeling refreshed and as if there was nothing planned for the day. I guess we're getting old because we spent Saturday driving around town and looking at antique stores. Does that mean I'm old? It was fun.

I love that feeling of waking up after a long night's sleep, heavy and comforting and restful. Usually, I struggle to fall asleep and try my best to get in some hours before the morning comes, but this last weekend I just.. slept. It was peaceful. Waking up that morning I was thinking about when I was a little kid and we all (three or four of us, back then) shared a room. The Anganes family has classically been an early rising bunch before the teenage years hit, and we'd wake up at the crack of dawn and cause trouble and eat candy out of the candy stash in the cupboards and have wrestling matches and punch eachother in the eye a few times. Some Saturdays, though, my parents would still be in bed and we'd go into their room and sit on their bed and it all seemed very idyllic to me, even back then. Summer Saturdays with the warm sun in the window, my parents already teasing us at an early hour, we'd drag our stuffed animals and blankets into the room with us. My Dad liked to do this thing where he'd ask to hold my stuffed animals and I'd tell him to forget it, because I knew what would happen. He'd be all, "Come on! I'm going to be so nice to him!" I'd finally be coerced into handing over this stuffed raccoon, Racky, who was practically a child to me at the time, and my Dad would cradle it in his arms, stroke its head and say, "Nice, nice, Racky," for a few minutes and then suddenly THROW it across the room and make it yell "AHHHHH!" I'd start laughing and be all, "DAD!!!" But I still let him hold my stuffed animals every time he asked, and every time, he'd toss them across the room and everyone laughed because, hey, poor Racky, that sucker.

I loved those Saturdays. I loved my parents taking turns praying with us in the dark at our old bedtime - 8:30. Sunday lunches at Yiayia's. Dancing to music with my Mum in our carpeted living room and watching her spinning around to the music while holding the baby forms of my now-adult siblings in her arms. The smell of gasoline and shop grease on my Dad, still one of my favorite smells. Seeing my Dad, MY Dad, holding new baby after new baby and finding it strange to share. Going food shopping with my Mom, all of us walking and tripping over each other in a row behind her in the crowded aisles, and the strangers who would say, "Your children are SO well behaved!" (We knew better, and so did Mum.) When I was older (and sometimes still now), going food shopping with my Dad as an excuse to hang around with him as he impulse-bought all the good stuff that Mum never let us touch when we used to go shopping with her. All the best memories that I forget to recall until the times that I do.

Whee! Mini vacations! Whee!

I'm slowly learning that it's really okay to cry for people who I barely know. I think I know all this stuff about them (every surgery, every bodily function), but I really don't, And it's okay, even then, to cry when I hear they're hopeless, they're dying, and sometimes they don't even know. It's hard to know someone's going to die before they do. Somehow it seems very invasive, intrusive. Like you have this big secret surprise that isn't appropriate for giving as a birthday gift. Just this big ugly thing you have to hide until they get the final reports and the doctors give them the news.

So. Lots of tears today. At 8:30PM, home welcomed me back, and waiting for me was Mark and a sandwich he had salvaged from a work-catered lunch. It was this long baguette of crusty Italian sourdough bread with olive oil, fresh, clean slices of homemade mozzarella, whole basil leaves, oregano, and thinly-sliced tomatoes. I don't really like basil, mozza, or tomatoes on their own, really. I could probably drink a cup of olive oil no sweat, but the rest of that stuff I could usually take or leave. Tonight it just tasted so good, though. It tasted so light and fresh that all of a sudden I found myself with tears dribbling down my face for the third time of the day, listening to happy songs, feeling joy and this weird detached (but personal) grief for people I don't know anything about besides the fact that they're going to meet their Maker very soon. And I can't say that they know Him very well at all. They think these trials of life are so difficult. They either are so full of bitterness at the hand they've been dealt, or they just are so oblivious, and yet, at the end of it all, if He says, "I never knew you"... I guess that's hard to take in for me.