Book of June

Today Marvin and I are getting together with my old friend Marianne and her son.

I know I have told you who Marianne is, but people come and go so quickly from this blog, and sometimes people don't read all 650 of my posts because they have lives, so I will recap.

I met Marianne soon after I moved to Seattle. Someone we both knew–who I will cleverly call Lois–dragged us to a rugby game on a Saturday morning. Lois was obsessed with rugby players.

We were not.

But Marianne had just moved to town from North Carolina and I had just moved to town from Michigan, so we were both pretty desperate for anything to do, because we knew almost no one.

So there we were, at a rugby game. In January. In the rain. Men were sticking cleats into each other's eye sockets like it was fun. We kept getting splattered with blood and bone shards. Marianne turned to me and said, "You wanna go back to the car and drink all the beer?" and I said, "Absolutely."

Lois didn't even notice. Did I mention she was a tad enamored of rugby players? Did I mention they could have started a whole new team, the "I Slept with Lois" team? Hell, they could have started a division.

We sat there with our six-pack, the rain pouring onto the windshield, and told each other our life stories.

From then on, we were inseparable. We went out dancing, we went to festivals, we rode the ferries, we just walked around Seattle and marveled at people. I lived in this trendy neighborhood, and every Saturday she'd come over and we'd go to the restaurant across from my house for breakfast. I am not kidding you when I tell you from that restaurant window, we would always see at least one person whose sex we could not determine. Always. Every Saturday.

We developed a theory that all the people with blue hair and orange hair and magenta hair? Their parents were troll dolls. Oh, we loved ourselves.

Even when I met my Seattle boyfriend, the one who married someone else two months after we broke up, Marianne was along constantly.

Here we are in 1994, leaving Kurt Cobain's memorial service at the Space Needle. I know that is totally a Seattle thing to be doing. The "I'm about to marry someone else" boyfriend took this shot. I like how somber we were. But really, we had been somber at the service. I am jamming out to my fringe coat and also Marianne's white leggings. Also, why do I try to have bangs with curly hair?

Oh! And as an aside, the boyfriend? Married a female rugby player. I am not even making that up.

When I got married, Marianne came to Michigan for my wedding. After the reception had quieted down, she and I sneaked off to the kitchen and stole a beer, then we sat in her rental car and drank it, just like old times. Except for the part where Lois was not digging a cleat out her rear end.

Anyway, Marianne lives back in NC now, and last night we were trying to decide where to meet. "Oh, I know a cool place in Winston-Salem," she said. I put her on the phone with Marvin so she could tell him where it was, because have you met me?

When Marvin handed back the phone, he said, "Marianne said there's a JC Penney nearby."

I grabbed the phone. "There's a JC Penney?" I yelled. "There's a slipcover couch on sale there that I really want to look at! We totally need a slipcover couch with these 86 pets."

Marianne said, "I could use a new slipcover, myself. Are just the slipcovers on sale?" "Yes!" I exclaimed.

We were quiet a minute.

"Are you laughing at us right now?" I asked her.

"We used to go out dancing till four, and now we're excited to look at a beige couch at JC Penney."

You think Penney's sells rugby shirts?