Big City, Green Lights

I've been twice to Boston in the last five days.

This is only worth mentioning because before that, it'd been a solid year since I hung there (excluding a couple Sox games and a few runs to the airport) and that strikes me as both telling and pathetic. Or pathetically telling, which is, you know, what I do...

The Kid set me up on the anniversary with a car and a babysitter so I could meet him for dinner. He had me at "babysitter" but the car was pretty fly too. Food was eaten. Champagne was sipped. Miller Lite was had -- and who knew they even served the swill at joints like that? But they do! They really do! They would not let me keep the bottle on the table, but bygones.

We hit up a bar in which I felt my June Cleaver meets a blonde Amy Winehouse might be less obvious and all I wanted was one of the glass mugs they hung above the bar with my own name etched into it.

The man behind me looked like a serial killer and while The Kid was in the bathroom, I imagined all kinds of strange and dangerous things about him. Then the bartender handed him his mug, etched with his name, and so I switched into imagining strange and dangerous things about me.

Three days later I drove my own ass to the City to meet a best friend from high school in on business from San Francisco. Two kids, a husband, saver of the world: if she wasn't so completely awesome, I would probably seethe with jealousy but mostly I just wanted to hug her and tell all my secrets. We told some, we ate some less than good food and drank a beer or two at a very lame sports bar.

I know! I meant to show her how Boston is sisters with Frisco but what with all the never actually going to Boston (anymore) (except to see BaldBlondeGirl), I just failed miserably. The conversation was an excellent distraction from my lameness in that department and also, I think the last time we were together here there, we were drinking canned Milwaukee's Best out of bathtub filled with ice. Might have been a bathtub in a really nice hotel (someone's dad was paying for) but still...

(Boarding school is so weird that way. The best part? You get so used to saying goodbye and hello again that distance and different lives matter so very little; you just pick up again like summer finished and carry on...)

We walked down the streets -- it was a Love Story kind of night, perfect weather, possibility everywhere -- and she said she could move here and I said I wish she would, not only to have her closer but because I knew she would most likely live in the city and then maybe, just maybe I could get my mojo back there (here? there?).

Like it used to be. Like when I knew all the coolest places to go and didn't feel funny and out of place. Like when I could walk the sidewalk in front of some dive bar/rock show venue and know people walking by. When I didn't grip her arm (or she mine) when the cars seemed too frisky in the crosswalk ("we can't die!" she said and she was right). When I was more happy about the lead singer not passing out on stage than I was about every green light I hit on the way home, which by the way, made me very, almost deliriously happy.

At dinner with The Kid, celebrating what turns out to be the Ivory Anniversary (he googled it, I didn't: note to future self: google next anniversary), he said, he considered pearls. I said, but I hate pearls -- hate them not so much as an idea or an item, but on me -- and he said, I know, but for a minute there I thought maybe you were over that and -- tiny fight ensued -- and I said I think I'm grown up but I still don't want to wear pearls and then -- another tiny fight ensued -- and we moved on.

(I think the waiter plunking down the bottle of Miller Lite helped to finish it off. It was a metaphor three dimensionally. And deliciously. And funny too. The ivory bag he decided on? YO!)

So, we moved on.

Like we all try to. Her job gets bigger, our kids get older, the gaps in our phone calls widen but we still know how to hang even though a couple years have passed since the last time. Our bills increase, our kids get older, the time that we spend alone seems to diminish by the minute but we still manage to make fun of serial killers. Because we roll like that, we always have, and it's starting to feel like we always will.

Those kind of changes, that seem to reap little change when you think about it, I like those changes. The other kind? The kind of change where you find yourself driving down a city street that is not your street anymore? And that will probably never be your street ever again?

It dawns on you driving home under a blaze of green lights that become both an omen and a reckoning -- because you realize how much you like being home after all and apparently some God of Traffic Lights knows that too -- but still? But still you wonder: do you even like music anymore anyway? Were you ever that girl who was completely at home backstage or at the bar giving out drink tickets, negotiating interviews, fending off without offending, knowing EXACTLY what she was talking about? Was that ever, in fact, you?

It dawns on you, on that short green-lit ride home, that secretly inside you felt all along like a girl from boarding school who was just playing the part. With nail polish.

And it dawns on you, suddenly, when you pull into your driveway, a driveway you helped to pay for, that you might be doing the same thing now.

That makes a girl all thinky and awkward. And quiet.

And turning up the radio, trolling the Itunes, cranking the Ipod. And writing it down.