Or whether it was just a weekend. I went to Fort Worth to see Moon and her family, and to go on her neighborhood’s annual historic homes tour, and little came out as I expected.
I began the weekend Friday with Amtrak running two hours late, a delay that only lengthened with a UP freight breakdown ahead of us that stopped us for an hour east of Hutto; the only positive bit of that was that it happened during lunch, which meant I could eat in the dining car without having to worry about chasing dishes across the table with the trains swaying. (Lunch was an indifferent vegetable stir-fry.) Overall I enjoyed the experience of riding a train which I’d never done save on excursion or commuter sections, but the delays frustrated me horribly. (This problem would be far less if there were some way to arrange that passenger trains don’t always have to suck hind tit and defer to every slow freight in the country, but as long as the track-owners have absolute power over traffic control, passenger service will remain a poor relation.) Instead of a trip that went from 10:00 until 14:30, I had one that went from 12:15 to 18:30, with two hours’ un-advertised wait.
Moon was already waiting at the station to pick me up, and we went to get D from their neighborhood bar (a block from the station) and go next door for a quite nice steak dinner at the restaurant where D2, Moon’s OSO, works as bartender. After that, C and D brought me back to the house and D ran Moon back to the restaurant to wait for D2 to get off work. I was tired from travel and near ready to lie down, but I still felt disappointed that Moon turned right around and went back to the restaurant instead of staying at the house. Intellectually, I couldn’t argue with her saying that she’d anticipated I’d be tired and ready to go to bed early, Friday was one of her regular nights with D2 and that there was no sense in her hanging around the house, and that she and I would be doing stuff together all day Saturday, but my emotions didn’t really want to hear about it, they wanted some strokes of their own right then . . . and didn’t get them. I swallowed the disappointment anyhow, and went to bed.
Saturday I was ready to be doing long before Moon was; since D2 works evenings, they play cards or dice or something until three or four in the morning before going to bed, and don’t get up until eleven or noon, or even later. I, however, slept in until 7:30 (when you get up at five to go to work, 7:30 is sleeping in) and was bored. Finally I washed up the night before’s dishes, which woke Moon (her bedroom shares a wall with the kitchen) and brought her out with a grumble about people who clashed dishes together at early hours but didn’t even make any coffee to justify it. Once she’d had a cigarette and enough coffee to begin to make sense, she dressed and we began working on a few odds and ends to prepare for the after-tour wind-down party (which D and Moon hosted this year). We went around the home tour the first half of Saturday afternoon, and I was more pleased overall with this year’s batch of homes than with last year’s. All six houses on tour (like all of the neighborhood) were Arts & Crafts period, more or less, and mostly they hadn’t been subjected to lots of stupid remuddles. There was one wonderful Greek Revival Eclectic duplex from 1925 that had, wonder of wonders, not been meddled with much at all—the only major change was to reverse the direction of one stairway, when it was converted from a duplex to a single-family residence. I was particularly impressed when I found that the bathrooms contained all their original tiling and almost all the original fixtures, save for one set of tub fittings some imbecile replaced in the 1980s. Bathrooms are one of the most remodeled rooms in any home, and to find one (not to mention two) in close to its original condition is a strong clue to a house free of remuddles.
Saturday night, after a series of discussions and arguments about where this and that and the other thing were going to be set up for the party, and how, D and I sat in the back yard for a little time and talked about relationships generally. A lot of it consisted of me listening to what he wanted to say; I don’t feel I took much of an active part, but at one point I did get to tell him that Moon, along with L and A, owns a piece of my heart (and those three are the only ones of whom I’d say that and mean it). For the life of me, I don’t know how he and Moon have managed to stay together all these years without everything coming to bits, for their communications styles are completely unlike and neither seems to me to have made any progress at learning to use or understand the other’s style—and Moon says as much herself! She says she uses and needs a very concrete way of talking about issues, and D talks about things in a very allusive and metaphoric way that leaves her completely at sea. On occasion they’ve each referred to me as their interpreter, because I can take what D says and recast it into something Moon can get hold of.
Sunday everyone (except D2, who wasn’t there) went off to church, but I begged off, saying the lack of a formal liturgy would vex me beyond tolerance. So while they were gone I washed up some more dishes, filled and set out a second bunch of tiki torches in the back yard for the party, and re-did my nails, because I ruined the polish doing dishes. Once they got home again, we all finished the party preparations—my responsibilities ran to making a batch of Purple Jesus punch (two liters each amaretto, sloe gin, Jack Daniels, and Southern Comfort, and four liters of orange juice) and coleslaw dressing, which I hacked together from two recipes out of the rec.food.recipes archives. I didn’t like either one as it stood, but I merged them and came up with one that did very nicely. (Moon and I had a momentary misunderstanding when I asked to use her Mixmaster, and she had no idea what I meant by it. I had to go get the thing off its shelf before she understood what I wanted.)
The party was…a party. I was only acquainted with half a dozen or so of the people there, and none of them well; still, there weren’t any Incidents, no one got particularly obnoxious, and the thunderstorm that had been threatening all evening held off until almost everyone was gone home. I think that, with luck, I muddled one late-staying guest’s preconceptions; she was bemoaning mid-life crises and biological clocks and such, and I ended up telling her about a time some years ago when L told a friend of ours, in all seriousness, that if she really wanted another child we’d provide the sperm (the friend was, at the time, a single mother of two middle-sized kids who really wanted another baby) . . . with the stipulation that the donation was going to happen in bed, in the way women and men have been doing it for millennia; L saw (and still sees) no reason that making a baby ought to be clinical. (As it happened, a couple of years later the friend married a wildly bad choice and got the babies she wanted, but also got a psycho-now-ex-from-hell who poisoned the kids’ minds against her.) D2, Moon, and D stayed up until all hours again, while I went to bed at midnight; I simply don’t have the ability to stay awake that late any longer, which naturally cuts down a lot on the time I can manage to be around with Moon.
Monday morning I got downstairs to find that the train home, which was supposed to arrive in Fort Worth at 15:30, was delayed by flooding and track washouts in Missouri that put it seven hours behind schedule. During the day they managed to make up thirty or forty-five minutes, but everything was still horribly behind, and I was feeling restless and ready to be gone—but there was no virtue and no sense in sitting in the train station for hours on end, so I was stuck at the house with nothing-in-particular to occupy myself. D woke up with a headache (that sounded a lot like a hangover to me, although I didn’t say so) and didn’t go in to work until noon, Moon didn’t get up until near eleven, and D2 didn’t get up until Moon woke him at 13:30. Meanwhile I was padding around, re-reading Kim for the I-don’t-know-how-many-th time, checking Amtrak for train status updates, and feeling out-of-place. D took me over to the train station about 21:00, and the train finally arrived about 21:45—whereupon we got to sit for almost an hour while new provisions and things were loaded, and we waited for a slow-moving TRE (commuter) train to clear the track. We cleared the station at last at nearly eleven, and had an uneventful trip after that, running almost to time. I was able to sleep, albeit uncomfortably, for a couple of hours, covered by a shirt from my weekend bag (I’d been cold all day long because of the late cold front that set off Sunday night’s thunderstorm, the A/C was on although not Arctic, and Amtrak provides pillows but no blankets).
We finally made the Austin station at a quarter of three Tuesday morning. I had to wake Erich and have him come fetch me; fortunately, he likes keeping very early hours anyway. Once he dropped me off at home, I stripped off my travelling clothes, changed into work clothing, lay down and managed another hour’s sleep before the alarm went off at five and I had to get up and get ready to catch the 5:45 bus to work.
I think the part of the weekend that bothered me the most, and that will continue to bother me for some time, is the re-ordering of my emotions I’m having to do as I try to acknowledge that my relationship with Moon isn’t going to become what I hoped it would, and as I try to let go of those hopes and return to Zen hunting—watchful waiting—hoping that someday the right Other will come into my life.
Smilin’ Jack captured the opulent margarita from Ignatz Mouse. Fnord.
