Birthdays and such

It was a really eventful weekend. I went to a movie with a friend on Friday night. We went to see "Lars and the Real Girl" which was laugh out loud funny and innocently charming. I really like going to the movies, I realized. And it was only $8! The $13 or $14 price tag in LA keeps me from going most of the time. And I tend to like artsy independendent flicks which most people steer clear of. Of course I saw previews for more films I want to see--Juno and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly to name a few.

Then Saturday night my dad and I went to the St. Louis Blues hockey game. He has a split season with a guy from work. They played the archrival Chicago Blackhawks--all the St. Louis-Chicago sports rivalries are so fun! I was born after a Blues hockey game. We would alternate going on season tickets growing up, even on school nights as a really special treat. This was also the night of the Mizzou/Oklahoma Big 12 football match up, which they showed on the jumbotron screens at intermission and afterward. Sadly, having been up for work at 6am that morning and having been out to see the movie the night before, I was falling asleep watching the Mizzou game, which they were losing anyway. Boo hoo. I definitely became a fan of theirs after Michigan bit it this season--from one block M to another, I suppose.

Then Sunday, my parents also have season tickets to the Repertory Theatre in St. Louis, a professional company that does plays and musicals through the winter months. My dad gave me the tickets to "Kiss Me, Kate" so that I could take an old friend from high school and growing up together at church who just lost her mom in July. We had a great time--the show was wonderful--just very well done, and then we got Ted Drewes Frozen Custard (a St. Louis classic on the old Route 66) and drove around looking at Christmas lights in South city. Too fun. One of the actors on stage was someone I grew up seeing at the Muny in St. Louis, where we also had season tickets growing up. The Muny is a huge outdoor theater that seats about 15,000 that puts on a different musical every week for 8 weeks in the summer. One of the standard supporting actors, who eventually would play leading roles like Daddy Warbucks and the like is an older gentleman named Joneal Joplin. I've seen him on the stage for at least 20 years, and I would guess he's about 70. He always gives such a solid, delightful performance, so I went up to him afterward and told him how much I'd appreciated seeing him, after being away from town for 10 years. I told him he was a St. Louis institution, which in my mind, he is. He seemed to appreciate. And now, making coffee for Jodie Foster and Elizabeth Reasor and Kristin Chenoweth, talking to Joneal Joplin isn't nearly as intimidating.

So it was a great weekend. Then it was my dad's birthday and we went out for such a pleasant dinner with two friends that he and my mom had met on a river cruise in Russia. We had a splendid time. I had amazing scallops, and I think my dad felt aptly celebrated. I sang to him in a scratchy, obnoxiously loud voice through his bedroom door as he was getting ready and I was going to work at 4:30 am.

And, having gone to a friend's band's gig in the city last night, I have now landed myself back in Los Angeles. I knew that when I left that the next time I would be back my mom would be gone. It was different flying in this time. It all seemed so much bigger and more expansive. The reality of mom being gone was settling in more as we descended through low clouds to LAX (that reality actually had been setting in the past few days...it's just been such a long time since I've talked to her, and I really wanted to these past few days, and I couldn't, and I won't be able to, and that was sad). But I'm excited to be back, to see friends, to be back at my Starbucks with my coworkers and customers. But my heart is definitely a little more confused, asking, "Where's home?" I've always appreciated how I've made a home in so many places--in little ways in that when I walk into someone else's house I don't really have a problem opening THEIR fridge--and in the larger ways of find a niche in a great big city or small college town. My time at home has been good, and I was antsy to get back to LA, but maybe I'm just too tired to handle this still, or it's too fresh and I realize the difficult road I have to walk ahead.

So take courage, dear heart. You do not walk this road alone.