How My Holidays Went


The pitas server seems to be having some problems - this is a late double post.

This is also one of my longest and most boring entries ever. If you just want to know how it all turned out, and what my plans are for the future, click here.If the link fails, go to the "Earlier Writings" button to the left and click on New Plans.

Saturday, December 22nd was one of the better days in my life.

I woke up that morning with my youngest sister, Abigail, and before anyone else in the house was really up we walked from my parent's new house in Nashville to the Hillsboro public library. The new neighborhood is so cool, but of course there were no sidewalks, because I was in Tennessee. Abby and I went around the fabulous children's room, and picked out masterpieces of children's lit like _Little House on Plum Creek_, _The Stinky Cheese Man_, and a book on multiplication tables. We sat and read in the sun until our dad came and drove us back to the new house. On the way inside, I fell down on the still green in December southern grass and rolled around a couple of times until my mom looked at me strange and told me to cut it out. I couldn't help it. The trees on the new lawn are big and tall and full of squirrels. The trees in the yard back in LaVergne were all either stunted or dead because we had no topsoil, just three or four inches of brown something over a giant sheet of limestone that couldn't be broken. Once we did manage to grow a plum tree, but it only gave fruit for a few years before it started to grow some sort of black cancer lumps and died.

But my parents don't live in La Vergne anymore. This was the first holiday season they had in the new house, in Nashville.

After lunch Christi Underdown (Chaos Girl) drove me to Tony and Andrew's in the 'boro, and we made ready for the party. Tony and Andrew rule. I owe them my firstborn child, maybe literally. That night, in the big house in Murfreesboro owned by Jeff where Tony, Andrew and Jason also live, we had a great big party.

Well, it wasn't as big as some of the giant tea parties, but it was grand. Maybe two dozen people. Lots of my friends from the bookstore, from MTSU Housing, fewer from Scribbling Mob than I would have liked, but I guess you can't have everything. Also just a lot of people I cared about, friends from way back. There was food and conversation and the X-Men arcade game in the living room and some naked people in the hot tub (which sadly didn't include myself, I was playing hostess). The party didn't really end until around 3am and then I stayed up another hour and a half talking to Virgil Pool, who has always been a night shift kind of guy.

When I woke up in the morning I drank maybe a quart of Andrew's thick strong sweet tea, the best ever, and cleaned up a bit. Then Christy Ford (who had spent the night as well), and I said our good-byes to the fabulous men and drove to La Siesta for lunch with Kati. There were Quesadillas and refried beans and more good sweet tea (not as good as Andrew's) and we talked for an hour before Ford left to ride back to her mountains. Kati and I hung out a bit and she drove me back to Nashville, where we had pizza with my dad and sisters.

On I-24 westbound into Nashville, Kati and I saw a billboard for MarryTheresa.com and had to look it up. Dear God. I don't want to be 34 with a billboard trying to find a man. Better just to do things on my own. Why does Theresa think she needs to get married anyway? She's clearly got a lot of money - better to bring some child from a poor position into her home, and make her own family. Kati and I couldn't understand why she didn't want to adopt.

Suddenly it was Christmas. Sara got a mini disc player and Abby got The Sims game, which turns out to be the ultimate form of little girls playing dollhouse. I got cash and some needlepoint from my mother. The night of the 25th, Jeff came over and we went out on the town in Nashville. We had drinks at The Gold Rush and talked about what the hell I was going to do with my life now that school was done and I had no more plans. I began to feel some serious conflicts - seeing all my friends at the party really made me think about moving back to Tennessee. I still had the job offer from Vandy, and Ron and Dinan's apartment on Belmont was downright cool. Plus, I was having a really good time with my sisters - it's hard for me to live so far from them. Jeff was very pro-Nashville. I felt mired in indecision, and even more so after Jeff took me around to see his friend Luke, and I met another cool person I won't get to hang out with. It's so very easy for me to make friends in the South. I feel like I'm missing social cues in the North. Further, the weather was starting to work on me. My indecision deepened, and Jeff and I decided that we needed to see Lord of the Rings to make us feel better.

Damn Cool movie.

Jeff and I hugged goodbye, and I realized my vacation was half over all ready.

The next day was Wednesday, when Abby and I walked to Christ the King playground and made chocolate chip cookies and tried to put together a puzzle from the dollar store that wouldn't work. These were good things.

Thursday I went To Ron and Dinan's and hung out with Joe and we all went to see Lord of the Rings again. It was better the second time, because Joe was there. He always knows just how to watch a movie. I talked to Ron and Dinan about my indecision and they just sort of laughed at me. We talked about how Tennessee has fallen to 49th in public education and how Nashville is just about bankrupt and how most of the recording industry has left town and how we didn't know how these kind of things would get fixed or even if they were fixable. We had some very good Indian food, and it made me miss Boston. At the end of the night, I still didn't know what I wanted to do.

The next day Underdown came and kidnapped me again, and we had lunch at the Captain D's across the street from Vandyland where a whole meal is only $2.99. I was still amazed at how everywhere we went there was sweet tea. Underdown apologized about the cruddy state of seafood in general in Tennessee and I said I didn't care because there were hush puppies and it was all two dollars and ninety-nine cents, though the sales tax on food made it $3.19, which is outrageous when you think about it.

We drove up to see our lady Athena, and that's when I thought my heart would burst, because for the first time in a decade the fences were down from around my Parthenon.

You know about the Parthenon in Nashville, right? The Greeks went and carelessly got the original Parthenon blown up, but in Nashville over a hundred years ago they rebuilt it, back when Tennessee was proud of education and art and wanted to be the center of things. It's to scale, perfect and large, and in the center of it all is Athena, three stories tall and terrifyingly beautiful.

But since 1991 or so, there have been big ugly gates up around the Parthenon, because the beautiful statues all around the eaves (which broken and original are the Elgin Marbles in England) were falling apart. The 100-year-old cement had begun to crumble, and it took them a decade to repair all the soldiers, kings and gods. Now the Parthenon is back as it was when I was a little kid and learned to fly a kite there on the slope away from the building. Christy and I ran around the giant steps and all over the place, until I fell down on the grass near the museum entrance and just lie in the sun, next to my building like I hadn't since I was small.

And Underdown said: "It doesn't seem like you've been gone at all".

And it didn't. I felt like an adult in Tennessee, and I guess I always have. I feel like a kid in Boston for some reason, maybe because everyone I hang out with is older than I am, and they seem to know what they're doing. But in Nashville I'm a grown up, a lady, a person who knows what she's doing. And now that the gates were down from around my favorite building, I had to think about maybe coming back, since Vandy wanted me.

I told Underdown so. I also told her about how I wanted to take off all my clothes and run around naked in Centennial Park, and that I was considering sleeping with an old friend of mine who had expressed some desire towards me in the past. Christi laughed at me, but later in that day gave me permission to use the infamous couch in her living room and also the keys to her empty apartment.

I did not run around naked in Centennial Park. I thought about it though.

Later, when Underdown and I wound the evening down and she drove me back to my parent's, we reflected on why I did not take advantage of the infamous couch and her empty apartment. I could have enjoyed a beautiful man there, and I didn't. I blew the opportunity off. I let the moment slide past me with only a little reflection. I turned chicken, turned away at the last possible moment.

It wasn't because I'm ashamed of casual sex (though my last boyfriend tried to tell me it was wrong and bad, he didn't succeed in shaming me). It's just that when I got there, the smells were right and the electricity was there, but at the same time everything was wrong. I'm in a different place in my life than the guy I had a chance with was. It would have been too complicated. It seems like the older we get, the more crap we carry with us as we go around bumping into other people. The combined weight of the emotional baggage I and the object of my desire carried would have broken the infamous couch in two, maybe even eight pieces. It was a clear no-go. Christi laughed at me again, because she has a steady lovely man named Mark, and she doesn't have to sneak around on infamous couches to see Mark naked.

Christi and I also hung out with Skeet and Turtle, two friends of mine from high school. I was sad that Molly, a new friend couldn't come, especially once I found out she had once done an interpretation of Ophelia as a Selkie. That's another new friend I made in five days. Turtle gave me sage advice on my internal dilemmas, but Skeet just voted that I move back to Tennessee. It was good to see them, good to hear their voices again after so long. I continued to stay on the knife-edge of my problem, dithering away. I did, however, make plans to go to Atlanta the next day, to once again look at the city I feel has been calling me for years.

That night, after the infamous couch episode and just before I rode to Atlanta, I had a dream.

In my dream, I was sitting in a restaurant in Boston with a guy I've had a crush on for months. And he looked deep into my eyes and took my hand into his and said:

"Elizabeth, don't embarrass yourself."

And I woke up cold and scared.

The next day I rode down to Atlanta with Ron, Dinan and Abby. Ron and Dinan dropped me and Ab off at our Uncle Doug's in Marietta, and then they were off to a New Year's house party down around Piedmont Park somewhere.

The next 24 hours were full of happy babies and people who told me to come live in Atlanta. And after a night's sleep there, I knew what my new plan was.