raisins, pee, and folk

      It started out yesterday as March should be; grey and very windy but mild.  I'd woken up exhausted, head full of sand, feeling like I'd been run over by a train the night before.  (Actually my choir and I had just had a gig.)  At noon I roused myself off the couch to the grocery store for some necessities:  yogurts, orange juice, cereal, the ingredients to beef stew.  Colin and I braced ourselves against the wind as it buffeted us about on the way to the car.  I was barely holding it together by then, already feeling sorry for myself for the several trips it was going to take me to get the groceries into my kitchen, and then how long it was going to take to put them away.

      As I stood in the slim triangle between car door, car, and cart, the wind gave a particularly potent just and whipped the door shut, slamming it into the cart with a loud bang.  The cart had saved me, but I was startled into a loud scream.  I felt heads throughout the parking lot turn to me, but I was too absorbed in my misery to care.  I dutifully trundled the hideous cart back to its bay, as always seeing how far away I could stand and still make it in, a sort of grocery cart free throw.

     Colin needed a snack when we got home, of course.  Not unusual, but this time he grabbed a bag of raisins he'd picked out at the grocery store earlier.  I'm always supportive of a snack that isn't donuts or cookies, so it pleased me.

     "I want some 'grapes 'n' sunshine' please," he announced suddenly in his deliberate, still-babyish 4-year-old voice.

     For a moment I thought I hadn't heard that quite right.  "What?"

     "Grapes 'n' sunshine," he repeated patiently.

     This was still one of the weirder things I'd ever heard him utter; I needed more explanation, more confirmation.  "What do you mean?"

     He seemed slightly put out at this point that I couldn't seem to grasp this simple concept, but he launched into a long description of the process in which grapes are made into raisins:  lying out in the sun, getting brown and wrinkly, etc.

     Once I had ascertained that yes, he really was referred to raisins, I attempted to coax out of him where he'd learned this bizarrely specific information, but that was a little beyond him and he floated away. 

     Speaking of Colin, he gave me a good laugh this morning.  I was woken to the blessed announcement that he'd crawled into my bed in the night and then wet it.  I calmly ushered him into the shower and then crawled back onto the dry side of the bed.  (Is that gross?  I'll tell you in a minute why it isn't that gross.)  After he'd saturated himself in there for a good long while- he's capable of happily staying in a warm shower for at least an hour- I got up to wash his hair and body.

     Colin hates soap in his eyes, and can't quite seem to grasp yet the idea of closing them when danger nears.  After I'd sent him back under the water with a soapy head, he began immediately begging me not to wash his face.  I grunted non-commitally and towed him back out of the water by one arm, making a quick pass with the bodywash over his body and, yes, his face.

     "Aargh!" he screamed in betrayal.  Then reproachfully:  "I didn't pee on my face!"

       Then I had this strange disconnect where for a few seconds I couldn't remember how to turn off my own shower, which I use every day.  But that's neither here nor there.

       OK so this is why lying on the dry side of the bed this morning wasn't the grossest thing ever.

     Last summer the family and I went to Europe on vacation.  On the way back we had some delays in the London airport; actually they were long, infuriating delays initially due to some bizarre fist fight on the incoming flight- I kid you not.  Just before we boarded (five hours late) I grabbed a chicken sandwich from a little deli where we'd been waiting in the airport and proceeded to become violently ill in the air between London and Cincinnati.  I was paralyzed in pain all the way through the Cincinnati airport as well, where they required us to pass through security on the way out of the airport (I think I remember flinging my confiscated water bottle down at the security officer's feet in frustration; luckily they didn't press charges) and all the way through the long bus ride to our fabulous, comped-by-Delta hotel in Kentucky.  (Kentucky!) 

     This hotel was a gem.  I wish I could show you a picture of it, but I've blocked its name from my memory.  It was, however, castle-themed.  I won't go into how ridiculous it was, because it's not really relevant to the story, but basically it... was not quite the fairy tale it was trying to be. We had two lovely adjoining rooms, spacious and with en-suite bathrooms, one of which I inhabited for a good part of that evening.

     So this is the gross part.  I was starting to feel a bit better, which isn't saying much, so I would occasionally shuffle, doubled over, from the bathroom to the bed and lie down there for a while.  The bed had a strange feel to the sheets; kind of cold/wet and with a sort of a film on it.  I immediately suspected the sheets hadn't been dried all the way after being washed, perhaps hadn't even been completely rinsed, but I wasn't exactly in a position to think too hard about it.  

      After a couple of rotations between the bed and the bathroom, I started feeling well enough to just lay there for a while on my back, knees curled up to my chest, rocking gently from side to side to soothe my many aches.  In about a half an hour my suspicions that the bed was indeed wet were indisputably confirmed.  My nightgown was soaked and caked to my body.  I turned over to sniff the sheets and smelled the ever so distinctive smell of... urine!  There in my suffering, in my defenselessness, I had been marinating in the previous guest's pee!  In horror I threw myself from the bed and into the shower.  The long sequence of unfortunate events were enough, though, that at that point I could do nothing but find it amusing.  At least I'd recovered from the food poisoning, and I think I've washed off all the pee by now...  :-)

     Funny that I'm babbling on and on here and I haven't even mentioned the coolest experience I had just last night.  Sam Payne came over and sang some of his songs at my house for a bunch of people.  It was awesome; I loved his jazzy/folky style and I enjoyed the intimate, in-home setting.  There were several kids there, including mine, and I was glad to give them the experience of hearing that right there in their living room.  It reminded me a little wistfully of a time not too many years ago when my life hadn't been far from what it was last night; music was all around me all the time, and not just mine.  There were folks playing in houses together, enjoying good company, children running through, spontaneous dancing, songs sung and stories shared.  Back then it was mostly Irish music, but sometimes after gigs we'd get together to jam with other types; bluegrass, folk, jazz.  Those were times I might find again, I realized last night.  Different, yet still recognizable at their heart.  And I look forward to that, to my children knowing intimately that music is real, that it's a way of life, that it's one of the things that makes it all... worth it.