Last night I discovered something about myself: After a Grolsch or two and the hour of midnight in very old houses, I regress to the age of five and begin hopping about looking for adventures.
It all started calmly enough, a birthday party for one of Marianne's colleagues at a lovely old house in downtown South Bend which is undergoing a massive renovation at the skilled hands of its owner. We arrived, mingled, had fun meeting new people (or at least I did; I've been out of the loop for a semester and now that I have a job that does not necessitate daily and total superhuman patience I can lose a small bit of sleep and still function), and generally behaved ourselves until Hans, the owner of the house, mentioned that the first floor boasts a trapdoor but wouldn't say where.
It was all ridiculousness from there.
I charged over to Marianne and shouted over the music about the trapdoor, and the two of us were off like little bunnies (or one big and one little bunny) jumping up and down on various places on the floor listening for hollow noises. We searched built-in cupboards. We opened a door and were nearly staked in the heart by a vast bundle of falling wood. We stomped and capered until we found the door in a most obvious place, then begged Hans to open it. We ran down the spidery stairs into the basement and came back up through the proper basement door. We were giddy with the spirit of exploration. We wished there were a secret passageway.
The rest of the night is a bizarre montage of poetic renumerations of springtime and autumn in Pennsylvania to a tall interesting gentleman who responded with stories of the Ukrainian Catholic church, a British marker fight, a self-proclaimed scary and ugly German student who is neither scary nor ugly, and clattering explorations of the many rooms of the house.
We stayed till four a.m. I woke wondering how much had really happened and how much was the product of the busy imagination of a bored and lonely single woman who stayed up far too late with people she hadn't seen in far too long. But there on my bedside table was the folded hand-drawn map to the Ukranian Catholic church in Mishawaka, with the tall interesting gentleman's phone number. (Yes, ladies and gents, I got a phone number at a party from a man who invited me to church.)
A perfect evening. Even if I had to talk to Marianne to verify that it actually occurred and wasn't a result of too many Buffy fumes clogging the brain.
2 comments:
Tall interesting gentleman brings so many images to mind... hope we get to hear more about him sometime.
sounds like an amazing night. It made me remember once, in high school, a male friend of mine called me one night and read me this poem he had written for me. It was terrifying because it said the "L" word. I woke up the next morning really really hoping it was a dream, and my sister kindly assured me that it was not.
Lucky for you, you were hoping it wasn't a dream!
:o)
Post a Comment