You came right away, but you never stayed.

Hello, yeah, its been awhile. Not much, how bout you? Last week, I visited with my friend Corrie who I helped move to SF (and who snapped the picture of this icon) who was home for the holidays and we repeated our afternoon of lunch at Ada's and dessert at the Walnut Room under the giant christmass tree. I had an eggnog beverage with liquor and wondered, who thought milk wasn't thick enough that it needed yolks added? It was the heaviest I have ever felt. I couldn't even consume my complimentary Frango that came with the bill.

The day after that, I made Martha Washington balls with Coxy. The day after that I travelled to upstate NY to visit with DYA's family for christmas. Then I returned home. And in this time, I talked to my parents on the phone twice. Once before I left, once on christmas morning (where I also talked to my aunt). Both conversations were fine, they were light and casual and topics were mainly about weather and food, and the first one had a certain edge to it, but the second one was tinged mostly with relief. Its another step. Just one. But still. It is what it is, something to be sort of surprised and proud of, something to be somewhat wary of. But I did decide to fedex them some of the candy. I was thinking of them when I made it, so it feels like a good thing to do.

In the next few days I must perform some magic, involve cleaning up the apartment, shopping for supplies, preparing and throwing a party. And then two days of rest and renewal to close out the year. Oh! And tomorrow night we are going to see a performance of the Nutcracker, for free, because a friend from my writing group plays cello in it and gets comps.

I have other things in my head to write about, topics ranging from the deadly fog of London in 1952, the assasination of Bhutto, christmas eve church services, family of origin, southern accents, It's a Wonderful Life and Jimmy Stewart's masculinity, Fleetwood Mac, new year's resolutions recaps, and more. But I'm at work and they will all have to wait.

I thought of you when I saw that on the TV.

I owned the two-disc Very Best of Fleetwood Mac for a few years, thinking it would be a perfect road trip set, long before I actually got a chance to test that hypothesis out. The first experiment was last summer, when I drove down to Bloomington, Indiana with it, and then back up to Wisconsin for camping. I listened to several songs a lot, because of my own romantic crises occurring in my daily life. Mostly it just made me happy. I brought it along for our trip this past weekend, and we listened to it once, getting us through a final stretch before arriving in the outskirts of Rochester for the night, and then we listened to it again last night, getting us through a final stretch before arriving in the outskirts of our own fair city. The first time was mostly singing along and the occasional "oh! I forgot about this song!" moments, but the second time we played the game of "Mushrooms or Cocaine?" for what drug they were on while writing certain songs. Some are more obvious that others. In the midst of it, DYA asked for the specifics of when they broke up and how, and I saw the Behind the Music years ago but couldn't piece together all the drama, though I did remember the major relationships, just not when they began and ended. So tonight at work, during the only 15 minutes when I wasn't doing dictation or data entry (it was a surprisingly busy night), I clicked on the wikipedia entry for the band. My eyes quickly glazed over. I couldn't keep up with it all. Granted, its the narrative prose of an encyclopedia, which is not necessarily terribly compelling as a reader, no matter how informative it might be. But one part that jumped out for me:
"While on tour in February 1971, Jeremy Spencer said he was going out to "get a magazine", but never returned. After several days of frantic searching, the band discovered that Spencer had joined a religious group, the Children of God. "

It takes that whole "honey, I'm going to buy a pack of cigarettes" idiom to a new level.

During this Fleetwood Mac listen, we stopped and ate our only fast food of the trip. I had made a roasted chicken on friday night that we ate on saturday, and DYA's mom sent us home with lots of dried fruit and fresh fruit and nuts and cheese and crackers that lasted us through lunch. But I was ready for my McDonald's fix. I went in alone, because we had recently stopped for gas. I was terribly excited to learn that they are now serving sweet tea, and while it is not amazing, its just as good as all the fast food sweet tea I drank while living in Atlanta. I also ordered DYA's hot fudge sundae.

"We don't serve ice cream, on account that we are located right next to the Dairy Queen."

Sure enough, the travel plaza had a DQ and it was a few steps away, and I had to go over there and pay twice as much for the hot fudge sundae. With no lid. Do you have a lid for this? "No," she said. Just no.

I got back to the car and couldn't stop giggling about the McD's guy, who had that Indiana blend of country accent with hint of southern drawl. I was especially fond of his inclusion of the word "located". I feel like that's some southern isht for real, where you use an extra word in an effort to articulate and be polite. He didn't say, "only dairy queen serves ice cream." He had to say "on account that we are located..." I had southern accents and cadences on the brain anyway, because of the phone conversations with my parents, and my aunt, who is especially thick in her southern mississippi drawl. It is, I must confess, terribly comforting to me. So much so that I am horrified when people say that they have a prejudice against southern accents for thinking people sound stupid, but I can't be that mad because sometimes I have the same prejudice against thick Bostonian/New Englander accents (sorry, dear readers, for whom that may apply). And while I feel relatively at home here in Chicago, I can never fully relax into the tight nasal sounds of natives from the area - at best I don't notice, but at worst, it can feel jarring and sharp. No, at my most sleepy, my most relaxed, my most drunk, my most happy, I prefer to slowly lilt.