Sunday, October 21, 2007

Return of Robb

It's been nothing short of a lovely weekend since I walked out of work on Friday, second to last to leave the building. No matter where I work, somehow I'm always last to leave.

Friday we headed to Manuel's on Congress where we met up with Matt & Nicole, as well as Lauren, who was flying solo as Steven prepared to return to Austin after a few weeks in Australia. Lauren had been with him, and for reasons I never gathered, she returned slightly ahead of our man, Harms.

At dinner I got very drunk. I have no idea why, but it seemed like a swell idea at the time. I do not drink much. Honestly, I never have. Certainly the years we were gone to Arizona, huge chunks of time would pass and I would have not so much as a beer with the fellows after work. But with Fall coming on, more than a year back in Austin under our belts, work seemingly going well, dinner with good friends and Lauren's birthday so recent... it seemed a good night to tie one on.

We all came back to League HQ after dinner, where I gradually sobered, and Lauren unwittingly popped open old wounds regarding my opinion of portions of my undergraduate education which led to an unpleasant tirade about the critical analysis of film as an academic pursuit vis-a-vis the Narrative Strategies course I took circa 1995... Anyway, it got late and Matt and Nicole bothc amped out at League HQ.

We woke up today, got breakfast for our guests, found the game on cable and watched Ut spiral out of control, eventually pulling it together again in the 4th quarter and putting a score on the board that suggests things were much more in hand than they ever actually were.

Ate an early dinner at Chuy's as we never had lunch (Matt and Nicole had departed), and came home to a message that an old friend, Robb K, was in town and would be appearing at the Texas Showdown for a limited engagement.

Once upon a time... when we were young and probably much more fun than we are today... Anyway, it had been, we realized, seven full years since we'd seen Robb. Honestly, I wasn't really sure what continent Robb was on. I'd heard he'd been craching in Berlin for a while, and would occasionally hear dispatches from the Seattle contingent that he was in New York or God-knows-where.

So, really, a sudden appearance by Robb is something one should really always have in the back of their mind as a possibility, even when one has not seen Robb in seven years.

We met up at the Showdown, pulling together with a fragment of the folks from back in golden, old days of college. Pat, Jeff, Matt, Robb and Jamie. It could have just as easily been an evening in 1997 or so, sitting around with a beer out back of some bar with Robb still hand rolling cigarettes.

We've gotten older now. Jeff is married, and so Keora was there. Nicole came and saw a glimpse of Matt's sordid past. But we're not all so different, even with jobs and mortgages and all that. We worry about different things, maybe. Certainly not school or grades or whatever we were worried about then. We're now almost ten years from when college graduation, and life's rolled on.

A gentleman cut in on our conversation and asked for a haiku.

We tried to push him off, but, as Matt said, there's so little Austin weirdness left, sometimes you have to grab onto the weirdness when it happens. Even when the guy ashes on Jeff by accident while asking for the haiku. So we had a collaborative haiku.

And despite the fact I kept wondering how this guy was going to try to make money off of us, I dashed off the final line and handed it off. "Time passes us by."

Because sometimes it does.

Whether we've been doing the same things for ten years, or whether we occasionally manage to pull it together and catch a glimpse of good days, I don't know. The days in Austin have been good again. We talked over that while we were eating at Chuy's thsi evening with Jason. It's been a strange 15 months or so. Lots of good days and bad, as I guess it goes, life is evening itself out. 24 months ago, going to Chuy's for an early dinner was something we would have talked about wishing we could do.

As much as I loved parts of yesterday, the parts you can remember while watching your friend hand roll cigarettes for the first time in seven years, there's always tomorrow. You sort of have to think about what you're going to do then, and the next day.

We made our Mister Miracle escape from the X-Pit and the Orphanage of Granny Goodness, but, like Scott Free, I know that's only the beginning. The traps aren't always so obvious, and complacency is as much a trap as anything else. We'll keep moving, listening for the pinging of Mother Box to tell us when its time to spring the manacles and jump free from the nose cone of the rocket.

Lately, I hear people grumbling a bit about Fall coming on, about shorter days and the end of summer. Maybe its too many years at universities and in education, but Fall is a time for new things, for thinking about the year ahead.

Up in Seattle, My and Brandy have found out they're pregnant. Jeff and Keora are talking about trying. On Thursday Peabo and Adriana stopped by with Owen (who looks like every other male member of Peabo's family already), and Peabo's as happya s I've ever seen him. Xander is already moving so fast, CB should put him in red jammies and call him The Flash, and David is here from North Carolina.

The world moves on, and time passes us by.

That's not a bad thing. We're doing okay. Both despite and because of the events of the past year, so are our family and friends.

1 comment:

J.S. said...

Robb. No one attacked a drum set quite the way that Robb did.