Of Surprise Parties and Forgotten Keys

                My best friend’s birthday is in May, so in high school that meant that her birthday came right before the end of the year.  Senior year, her 18^th birthday fell on a weekend, so she invited our little group of friends over. We did this sort of thing all the time, so it wasn’t exactly a birthday party, even though I talked Emily into bringing cake and the rest of us went out and bought presents. It was just like a normal sleepover, but with presents (the cake is actually a staple of our sleepovers. And cookies. But that’s not really the point).

                As it turns out, Allison’s twin’s girlfriend was planning on holding him a surprise party that same night, and for some reason she’d thought it would be a party for Allison too – not sure where she got this idea, because she’d never even mentioned it to any of Allison’s friends. But somehow Alli got wind of it, and she agreed that we’d all show up for at least the beginning of the party, even if we didn’t stay. (We never really planned on staying – we knew Wes’s friends, but not that well, and we had our own stuff to do.)

                I showed up at Alli’s house at least 15 minutes late, because I’m always late – surprisingly, I was the first person there, which is really weird because Emily and Danielle are ALWAYS on time. Turns out that Emily had actually been on time, but she’d just dropped the cake off and had to run off to do something that would take a few hours, but that she’d be back. Danielle showed up a couple of minutes after I did, and we were just waiting for Abby (who was ALWAYS late, even later than me), and Allison told us about the plan – we were supposed to wait around and leave after Wes got home but before he left for his girlfriend’s house, for whatever reason.

                Wes showed up, and Abby hadn’t made it yet, but Danielle had just gotten a text saying that she was on her way. We were twitching a little at this point, because we needed to leave before Wes did (otherwise we’d miss the part where you jump out and yell “Surprise!” which is the best part, honestly) but we couldn’t just ditch Abby… So we did what any self-respecting group of 17 year old girls would do – we ran outside and waited for Abby to show up, then ran like crazy people at her car. When she slowed down we jumped in and yelled, “Drive!” And the great thing about Abby? She did. Without stopping and seriously questioning our sanity.

                We eventually managed to explain the plan to her – between fits of hysterical laughter, I mean, Danielle had run out into the road and jumped up and down in front of the car, waving her arms and squealing – and she drove us all over to Wes’s girlfriend’s place. We got there considerably before he did, which was awkward – like I said, we knew Wes’s friends, but they weren’t really our friends, too, more like acquaintances – and caused me to mutter to Allison, “And this was supposed to be your party too?”

                After Wes finally showed up and we shouted “Surprise!” the four of us stuck around for maybe 10 minutes. It was a pool party, kind of, and none of us had brought a bathing suit, and we had our own cake (which I was sure was better than the cake they would be serving. Emily has mad baking skills) and presents to deal with. So we hop back in Abby’s car and head back to Allison’s house, only to discover that in our rush to leave, Allison had forgotten her key. And her parents had left to take the dog on a walk. So . . . we were locked out of her house.

                Naturally, this development caused great hilarity (what? We were teenaged girls. Hilarity’s pretty much the default setting) and we ended up sitting outside on Allison’s front porch waiting for her parents to get home, swatting at mosquitoes (summer in Houston. They are unavoidable) and coming up with the plot for a telenovela that we could perform in Spanish class. It was possibly the most fun I’ve ever had at a birthday party.

Of Snowmobiles and Trees

       When I was 15 years old, my family and I spend our spring break skiing in California. Now, this is probably not a terribly usual statement, but bear with me. My little sister is extremely susceptible to altitude sickness, so the usual ski resorts in Colorado aren't really an option for us - we have to go to the ones that aren't quite as high. Lake Tahoe, on the border between Nevada and California, has a lot of really good lower elevation skiing, so we go there a lot.
        We had been skiing for a few days and decided to take the day off to do something different. We'd been snowmobiling before - a couple years before, I think - and we'd really enjoyed it then, so we decided to try it again.
        I'd recently gotten my driver's permit, so I begged my parents to allow me to drive a snowmobile on my own. They were reluctant, but they agreed. As it turns out, this was a mistake, but at the time I was super excited. The guide explained how to work everything and then we all put our helmets on and hit the trails.
       At first it was a little scary, driving the snowmobile - in order to get it to turn, you have to really throw your weight around, and I wasn't really that big or that strong at the time. I was at the back of the group because I was going much slower than everyone else, trying to figure out how to work this thing.
       We finally reached our destination - a large open meadow - and the guide let us race around in big circles. Around this point, I was starting to feel more comfortable with the snowmobile, and less like I was liable to crash into something at any moment. So I started racing around, going as fast as I could (and sometimes a little faster than was probably wise) and racing against my siblings, who were being allowed to drive as long as we just stayed in the meadow.
          I'd been having a lot of fun going fast in the meadow, so when we started back down the trail I felt a little more confident about picking up some speed. Apparently our guide felt confident about that as well, because he up and took off - I have no idea how fast he was going, because the spedometer on my snowmobile was broken - and my dad and sister (who was riding with him) took off after him. I really wanted to keep up, so I took off after them - and the skis on the front of my snowmobile caught on something, some rut in the road, and sent me careening off the path and directly into a huge tree.
        Here's the thing about crashing into trees - they don't move. Like, at all. So I did a (very graceful) somersault through the windshield on the front of my snowmobile, over a branch and into a snowdrift. It was one of the absolute scariest experiences of my life, and I was so hopped up on adrenaline that I didn't even notice I was injured at first. I scrambled back up the side of the path - we were on a mountain, everything's on an incline - and literally the only thing going through my head was, "Oh, my gosh, I broke the snowmobile, we're going to have to pay for it, Mom and Dad are going to kill me."
         My mom and brother had been behind me on the trail, and they'd seen my spectacular fail. They pulled over and Mom was off the snowmobile like a shot, wanting to see whether or not I was ok. I told her that I was fine, that I was so sorry about the snowmobile - she didn't seem too worried about that, though, because she was so relieved that I wasn't dead - or hurt, as we thought at the time. She told me to go and sit over on her snowmobile while she went and looked at the damage, and I agreed.
         As I sat down on the snowmobile, I glanced down at my leg. The pants I was wearing were ripped a little on my right thigh, and I thought to myself, "Great. Just great." I pulled at the rip to look at my leg, having learned from experience that ripped clothing typically meant an injury of some sort, only to see that a chunk of my leg was missing. I put the cloth back down, carefully, and called to my mother. "Mom? I think I took a chunk out of my leg."
       They drove me to the hospital - I'm not sure if I was in shock or not, but I remember crying pretty much the whole way there for whatever reason (it wasn't even the pain) - and I had 3 layers of 26 stitches put in. I had refused to look at my injury until it was stitched up, so I don't actually know how bad it looked before it was stitched up - the little glimpse I got of it when I noticed my pants were ripped was just that, little - but the scar on my right thigh is very impressive. Needless to say, I am never allowed within 15 feet of a snowmobile again.

Palo Duro Disaster

                We were on our way back home from Colorado. My sister and I had been on tour there with our church choir, and my mom had chaperoned the trip, so it seemed like a good idea for my dad and my brother to drive up and listen to us perform, and then spend a week hanging out in the mountains after the tour was over. So we were driving home.

                The halfway point between home in Friendswood and Colorado is either in New Mexico (usually Raton) or the Texas Panhandle. Dad and Daniel had camped out in our brand new tent on their way up to join us, so we were going to save money and camp on our way back home again. We decided to stop and camp in Palo Duro Canyon – during the summer they put on an outdoor dinner and musical every night. I’m always a fan of musicals, so I was ok with that part of this plan, but I was not really ok with the idea of sleeping in a tent. I’m a bed girl, thank-you very much, and sleeping on the ground – even on an air mattress with sheets and everything – was definitely not my idea of a good time. I had lobbied strenuously for a hotel, but had been ignored.

                My dad, naturally, picked a camping spot in the absolute farthest campground from the park entrance possible.  On our way back to set up the tent before going to the dinner and a musical, we drove over several “Water Crossing” dips in the road, all of them dry as a bone. It was the middle of a massive drought – hadn’t rained in weeks, or something like that.

                The dinner was pretty good (there’s not an awful lot you can do to mess up steak and potatoes, seriously) and the musical was alright. I mean, they were pretty good singers, and the plot (while cheesy beyond belief) actually existed, so it wasn’t horrible, even if they kept breaking character. . . So the point was not to critique the performance, which was, like I said, not horrible. The main plot of the musical revolved around people living in Texas during a massive drought sometime in history, and they have a “thunderstorm” at the very end. As soon as they played the thunder sound, real lightning and thunder started flashing in the background.

                I guess we thought it was heat lightning or something. Anyway, we headed back to the tent and got ready for bed – by the time we were going to sleep it was probably sometime around 11:30. I didn’t really sleep so well – like I said, I’m a bed girl, and I was not happy with the sleeping arrangements. Not that it mattered that I wasn’t sleeping well, because shortly I was not sleeping at all.

                At around 3 in the morning, it started storming. The thunder and lightning were right overhead, and the wind almost blew the tent over on top of us several times. The rain was pounding on the roof of the tent (when the roof of the tent wasn’t trying to collapse on top of us) and it was impossible to sleep through.

                After about an hour of this, my dad got up and told us to pack up, because we were leaving. Of course, as we finish packing, shoving everything haphazardly into the back of the car (seriously not cool, because I sit in the backseat and since we weren’t being terribly careful about it there was almost no room for me) and packing up the (muddy) tent, the rain had stopped, and the storm had moved on. Of course, we were packed already, so we might as well head out, right?

                Wrong. Remember all those “Water Crossing” signs we passed on the way in? Turns out that they were flash flood ditch warnings. And, of course, they were full of running water – lots of it. Enough that even though we were in a Suburban, and pretty high off the ground, we didn’t want to chance going through it and getting the engine flooded. So we drove around for a bit looking for a back exit from the campground – but no luck, it was flooded as well. So instead we ended up parking back at our camping spot and curling up in the car for as much sleep as we could get before the water subsided enough to be driven through.

                I didn’t sleep at all during this time period, although I tried. But having to fold yourself basically in half in order to fit into the space available does not lend itself very well to sleeping, or at least it doesn’t if you’re me. So I spend what was possible the most uncomfortable hour and a half of my life folded in half in the back seat of our Suburban before my dad decided that the water was low enough to drive through. We ended up leaving at around 5, and drove for a couple of hours before we found a place to grab some breakfast for ourselves. It was a very long (and tiring) drive home.

Childhood Pets

            My dogs come as a matched set – both black lab mixes, and utterly inseparable. Midnight is a little smaller, a little slimmer, with a pointed, fox-like face and a curly tail that serves as an excellent indication of her mood and energy. If it’s curled up over her back, she’s happy and energetic. The more it loses its curl, the less energy she has. Charlie is a little bit bigger, with the strong-jawed face of a true retriever, even though it’s obvious that he’s not a full lab. He’s built solidly, and if he weren’t such an absolute sweetheart he’d be a little scary.

            Midnight’s the more high-strung of the two – she’s very clearly the Alpha of their little pack of two, and she really hates it when any other dog tries to muscle in on her turf. It makes for some interesting times when we try to dog-sit. Charlie is so easy going that it’s almost not funny – I have yet to see anything actually upset him. When we were younger and had just gotten the dogs, my little brother (who must have been 7 or 8) decided that it would be a good idea to try and play tackle football with the dogs. Needless to say, Midnight did not appreciate this effort and made her displeasure clear by fleeing the scene. Charlie just laid there patiently on the floor, waiting for Daniel to get bored and leave. When my friends come over to hang out, the dogs usually come up to my room and visit, and someone usually ends up using Charlie as a pillow. He doesn’t seem to mind.

            We’re pretty sure that the two of them are related somehow, probably on their father’s side. When we took them to the vet for the first time after we got them, she said that Midnight was probably about three months older than Charlie, so they can’t have the same mother – but they look similar enough to have the same father. Both of them are black lab mixes with a single white star on their chests.

            Their exact origins are unknown – they turned up under my best friend’s father’s car the morning before her 11^th birthday party. I saw them and fell in love with them at first sight, and it didn’t take nearly as long as I’d expected to convince my parents that adopting two half-grown puppies was a good idea. They made our old dog’s life miserable (even though they were fairly laid back for puppies, he had been head honcho for 12 years, and he was too old for puppies), but my siblings and I loved them. It was nice to have dogs that actually liked children around.

The View From My Window

            Looking straight down, it’s a three foot drop to the roof of the screened-in porch. Across the expanse of grey shingles that make up the roof, the massive maple tree waves its branches, beckoning me to come and play. Bright green leaves whip back and forth, inverting themselves suddenly in a gust of wind. The maple is at least 12 years old – I can only just remember when we planted it, and I can’t remember what it looked like before it got this tall at all anymore. My room is on the second floor of the house, and the top of the maple has long since passed my window.

            If I look off to the left, past the edge of the roof, I can see the concrete slab of our driveway extending out from the garage. The roof of our garage is just barely visible, stretching away from my window, as my room sits in the corner of the house. My little brother loves to throw his tennis ball against my wall in the morning during the summer. I haven’t figured out yet whether he’s doing it on purpose to wake me up, or he just doesn’t realize that that’s my wall.

            Dad’s basketball hoop sits at the edge of the concrete slab, presiding over our “half-court” driveway. It barely gets used any more – we’re all too busy. The backboard is faded away to a non-descript white color and the pole is rusting away.

            Right at the edge of the porch’s roof and the concrete slab stands the world’s most pathetic pine tree. It’s been there forever – it came with the house, and I’m not sure whether it’s healthy at this point. It keeps shedding its needles in the fall, getting all over the driveway and any car that happens to be parked there, so we haven’t done anything to it yet.

            Looking out past the maple and the pine tree sits our massive tallow tree. It’s not as tall as the maple, but what it lacks in height it makes up for in width. Dad hates it – he says it’s a weed tree, and he’s been trying to convince my sister that we should cut it down for years (unfortunately for him, around the time he started to get serious about cutting it down, she turned into an environmentalist). It’s a really messy tree – constantly dropping twigs, leaves and seed pods all over the yard.

            It's home, and I love it.

The Open Window

       I'm usually pretty good at figuring out the twist at the end of the story, but I'm not going to lie - I totally missed this one. The similarities between the main character in this story and the main character in "The Yellow Wallpaper" certainly led me to believe that the ending would be ghostly in some way. I was a little surprised by the ease with which the hapless Mr. Nuttel accepted the niece's story, but I suppose that his nerves predispose him to be more weak-minded than normal?
      Honestly, I still can't figure out why "complete rest, an abscence of mental excitement, and avoidance of anything in the nature of violent physical exercise," sounds like a good idea to anyone. It sounds horribly boring - I'd lose my mind in less than a day, completely bored out of my mind. It sounds like a dreadful thing to prescribe to any patient, especially one with any sort of mental problem. Rest, sure, rest is a good thing, but when you send someone to rest on a vacation, you generally think that they'll get out and go do things.
      I was impressed with the niece's imagination. It reminded me a little bit (this is going to make me sound so old, I know) of Anne of Green Gables, who had one of the most ridiculous gothic imaginations I've ever found in a fictional character. The difference here being that Anne spent most of her time convincing herself that the things she was making up were true, where the niece really only seems interested in how many other people she can get to believe her stories.

Relationships

     Every time I read one of Hemingway's stories, I feel like I have a better idea of why he was married and divorced so many times. In none of his stories have I seen a truly healthy male/female relationship, except perhaps the one married couple in "Ten Indians," and we really didn't see enough of them to be able to characterize their relationship as healthy or unhealthy.
     There is a lack of communication, or at least meaningful communication, in every Hemingway story that we've read so far. The characters either don't say what they're really thinking, or they just allude to it, or they say simply nothing at all. I can't help but wonder if this is something that Hemingway thought was normal - and if so, I can understand why he was divorced so many times.
     Men may say less than women, on average, but that doesn't lessen the need for honest communication. They simply need to learn to use their words to best effect. Hemingway may have tried to do that, but from the stories we've read so far, it doesn't seem to have worked. For example, in "The Short Happy Life of France Macomber" Mr. and Mrs. Macomber don't have a single conversation where both of them are trying to communicate. Either he's talking and she's not listening, or she's talking to him about something he doesn't think is very important.
     Hemingway makes a number of other interesting points about the Macombers' relationship in this story, especially when Wilson observes that Mrs. Macomber must have married him because he was the type that she could control. That - and the obvious implication that this wasn't the first time she had been unfaithful and less than discreet about it - made me sad, a little. I'd like to read a story where the characters had a healthy relationship - but something tells me that I may have to go looking somewhere else, because Hemingway doesn't seem like he knew a lot about those.