My Twilight Zone 28 Hours

Today is Thursday. My Tuesday and Wednesday were like a sandwich, with bread made of trivia games and filling made of thick-cut memories, gratefulness, high-end irritation, and a slather of strangeness. It tasted good, though.

Tuesday 

2:00 Tracy and I show up at the house with an inflatable mattress and linens, and I proceed to set up our new bedroom upstairs as if we lived there, but with a hard plastic mattress and a box for a bedside table. Excitement! My plan is to host a special guest downstairs and spend the night for the first time.

3:00 Special guest shows: my ex-husband, Paul, has driven from West Virginia with a car load of stuff for the house: boxes and boxes of my memorabilia I’d left in the attic of our former family home. He so generously lugged it all the way to Wisconsin for me. We dumped it in the living room and stared at it in amazement.  My dad’s art! My dad’s double-barreled shotgun? An entire box of stuff I took from my sister’s house when I showed up right after she died. Doggie, my sidekick stuffed animal from when I was a little kid. On and on. 

4:00 Tracy, Paul, and I walk to the local tavern for a bite, and instead of stepping into a working-class dive bar as expected, jazz greets us and a huge back wall of glass shelves with lighting under each, and a bartender wearing black, and very fancy tacos. Plus, trivia to start in a couple of hours. We text our friends Guy and Patti, who were about to meet us at a different bar down the street, to come here instead.  We have a table for trivia! We have tacos!

6:00 Team Older and in the Way (with guest Paul) sweep the first round, sweep the second round, only to plummet to last place in the end because we guess wrong on which country’s capital’s formal name is the longest place name in the world. Feel free to guess; everyone else knew it but us. Also, the tacos weren’t all that great, and the beer choices were few. Sour grapes. Fancy bar my foot.

8:00 I say goodnight to Team Older and in the Way, and Paul and I walk back to the house to sit and wonder at all my weird stuff in boxes. We take a few things out and reminisce about them. 

9:00 I go upstairs and try to sleep in new my bedroom. Inflatable mattresses are cold. My only light is my book light.  I have lots of memories downstairs. Finally, I sleep. 

Wednesday

6:00 I watch sunlight creep across the walls in my new bedroom and am grateful. 

7:00 Paul and I walk to a coffee shop and talk about my life on the road and my decision to settle down. It’s all hard to convey. I realize I will have to tell this story to a lot of people, so I better refine it. 

9:00 We load some of that memorabilia back into his car, and he drives me to the apartment where we unload it, and he drives away.

12:00 Tracy and I eat lunch, and I glance at the pile of stuff Paul brought.  I send a photo to my old friend Karen of our Pac-Man scores from when I owned an Atari. That’s about all I can muster. 

1:00 Tracy and I have our first meeting with a contractor, a big “Design Reveal.” Absolutely every single thing the designer reveals to us is wrong. She has forgotten two windows. She has neglected to give us a dishwasher. She has been unable to design the bathroom in its footprint so has moved it into the room beside it. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. We spend two and a half hours with her, with a brief interlude when another employee enters the meeting to stand in the doorway and flail her arms around. Tracy jokes about burning the house down, but there is more anger in his voice than jest. 

4:00 We stop for donuts on the way back to the apartment. 

6:00 It’s time for online trivia with the Donner Party and my box of memorabilia looking at me. We do well!  The game isn’t live so we always do well. So much fun, though, as it was with Older and in the Way. 

My Grateful Take-aways

The bad house designs are all steps towards good designs. We learned a lot from that meeting, and maybe round two with that company will go better.  We meet with another company, our final contracting choice, next week. 

Look at all the items I did not know I own! A quilt I had made eons ago from old t-shirts, some of which are precious to me. A poem my dad jotted for me a couple of years before he died. My grandmother’s cornbread recipe that my sister had framed. My master’s thesis on for disk. Egads am I grateful for these things.

I like the bar that’s on my street, and I like the coffee shop just a couple of blocks down. I like my friends. I like my house, no matter where the new kitchen goes.