Color me happy

 

I had dinner with three wonderful gentlemen tonight at Tokyo Café—sons Colin and Jamie, with grandson Jacob in the middle. Of course, the boys recounted many tales of their misspent youth, but they interspersed sage advice on how to handle college—lessons they wish they had learned earlier. Jamie has long been a sushi fan, but I didn’t realize both Colin and Jacob would do so well on it. I was piggy—shared the cucumber salad with Jamie and then had salmon sashimi and beef and broccoli. All of it so good.

On the way home, Jamie wanted to stop at Eatzi’s and emerged with chocolate mousse, rich with whipped cream, banana pudding, and a blueberry cake of some sort. I could not even finish my portion of the mousse—so rich!

Tonight as I write, Jacob is studying, and Colin and Jamie are in my cottage having some sort of impassioned discussion that I have tuned out. But it is a joy to have them in the same room—and sleeping under the same roof. Well, the adjacent roof If not really mine.

Today Colin and I took Sophie to the vet for a checkup. This was a bit of a challenge for me, because Colin drives a humongous pickup, and I couldn’t figure how he would manage me, my walker, and the dog. All he would say, as I did my usual fret and wring my hands, was, “Trust me.” He had brought a stool for me to climb up to the truck—the third time I think I mastered it. Meantime, Sophie, who hates to go to the vet with memories of her two-week-plus incarceration there, behaved beautifully. She got a clean bill of health after extensive, expensive blood work.

Sophie has not, however, been behaving as well at home. She adores having my boys here. So last night she woke me to go out at two and six, to be fed at seven, to go out at seven-thirty. When Colin finally came to give her the morning insulin shot, I begged him to take her back in the house with him, so I could get another hour of sleep. Most of her trips, I am sure, were not because she needed to go potty but because she wanted attention from Colin. Now, tonight, with both boys here, she’s liable to be more difficult than ever. I guess it’s the price I pay for having them here.

Colin has been working remotely every day. This apparently is a bad week, with heavy financial deadlines, so he is reluctant to take much time off. On the other hand, Jamie, who is between positions and not at all worried about it, is devoting his life to yoga and will go to a class tomorrow and another Thursday morning. Tomorrow I will call and see if it’s a good day for us to visit my brother in rehab.

And maybe there’s a delicatessen lunch in our future. Colin particularly loves Carshon’s, where he’s been going since before he can remember. For him, no trip home to Fort Worth is complete without a Rebecca sandwich. I think I’d like a tongue sandwich, which sends the rest of my family into rigors. But I grew up eating tongue, and I like it. Kidneys too, but we won’t go into that discussion. Jamie may however sneak off to Ernesto’s for a much-needed fix.

Visiting me, both boys are returning to the city where they grew up. I notice every time I get out that things change daily—to often, it’s an unfortunate stretch of look-alike houses that make me despair for the mid-century bungalows and their history that are now gone. Here a new building, there another gone. So if I notice these changes on a daily or weekly basis, the changes they see every six months or so are amazing. Colin today saw the new TCU Hyatt Hotel which he apparently had never noticed before, even though it’s right across the street from my old office. Fun to watch them discover the changes, and yet Colin and I agreed on the drive home from the vet that Fort Worth is, as always, a pretty city. We were driving down Hulen where it goes downhill toward Bellaire Drive, overlooking lush green treetops for a good distance.

As you can gather, these are happy days for me. I am keeping up with my office—emails and the like and making a few stabs at new connections—but this is pretty much time out for me. Meanwhile, Jordan reports from San Miguel that they are having a wonderful time. Life is good all around.