Into the Great Wide Open

The things you miss when you have a social life every night.

There's the luxury of listening to country songwriter Brent Cobb who, I learn, hails from Ellaville, Georgia ("There's 1609 people where I'm from") on the radio telling his life story between singing songs from his new album.

The fact that I'd never heard of Brent only made hearing all this the more satisfying.

His life includes admitted worship of Shooter Jennings' attitude and Tom Petty's songwriting chops ("His songs seem simple because it's so conversational, because Tom Petty sings it like he says it") and makes for pretty entertaining listening as I putter about doing further trip preparation minutiae that will allow me to cross things off one of my many lists.

Like watering plants, choosing books and locating accessories. In what girlfriends would expect to be the unlikeliest of scenarios, I fashion a necklace out of one I'd created a couple years ago for a disco-themed party. Tonight, it lost the '70s flower and returned to its initial funky charm, albeit with some lengthening for a different look.

But all gainful activity pauses when Ray Charles' instrumental version of "One Mint Julep" comes on, not because I'd ever heard it before but because between its oh-so-'60s rhythms and beatnik-cool horn section, it is aural perfection that obliterates my capacity to do anything but wish I could samba or cha cha cha around sleek mid-century modern furniture in a Manhattan apartment.

As I'm grooving by the front windows, I glance down when I hear wailing. The Dad and sister of one of my young downstairs neighbors has kindly come to help the recent graduate move out, the mistake being that Dad left the driving and thus the parking to daughter, who has managed to park only after adding a fresh pole-shaped dent to the trunk and bumper.

It's a nice deep dent, too.

Standing next to the pole that managed to jump out at the back of the car, she whines, "I don't know how I did that!" to which I think, clearly there's much you don't know since the parking space could have accommodated a Chrysler as big as a whale and you struggled with your little entry-level Hyundai.

She tries the trunk, which no longer opens with the new pole imprint folding it into itself. Dad, meanwhile, is apoplectic, exchanging with her heated words in Spanish about her egregious error in judgement.

A simple trip to pick up your brother and look what you've done, his rapid-fire words and fierce scowl seem to say. Brother and friends come out and much excitable conversation unfolds. Clearly we have a situation on Clay Street.

Who knew there was so much drama right in front of my house on a Wednesday night? Certainly not me since I'm gone every night.

Later, when I come downstairs to go to the basement, I find a smiling man on the front porch, eager to introduce himself as Levar Stoney, former Commonwealth's secretary and recent addition to the mayoral race, the fourth I've met so far. Levar clarifies that he is the first in his family to graduate high school, much less college.

That's bootstraps right there.

So on a sunny summer evening at a time when I'd usually be out and about, we stand - he on the porch, me on the sidewalk - chatting genially about the next mayor addressing the deplorable school situation so we will stop losing families to the 'burbs once their tykes are school age.

Levar apologizes for his relative youth - 35 - but I point out that one need only be 35 to be President, so if it's apparently not too young for that job...

The funny part is, as soon as the words are out of my mouth, I think about this fact for the first time probably since Civics class and wonder holy hell, why would we even consider putting a 35-year old in charge of the free world?

I mean, 35 was old when the Constitution was written, so the age represented a far more evolved person than would be likely today.

For heaven's sake, it recently made news that for the first time in 130 years, Americans 18-34 are more likely to live with Mom and Dad than in any other living situation. Come on, millennials, what happened to good old-fashioned living in sin, or better yet, in a group house with other minimum wage lifelong students and artist types?

Really, Mom and Dad were the only choice?

I'm inclined to think that theoretically there should be more years between moving out of your parents' basement and into the White House than one. Let's say a minimum of ten and if we have to adjust the preamble to allow for delayed adolescence/arrested development, I say do it.

For that matter, are we even producing 35-year olds capable of running a country? Seems doubtful.

But that will have to be a discussion for another day since between phone conversations, hemming dresses and attempting to pack lightly, I have bigger fish to fry. Preferably a nice skate wing in brown butter with capers.

For now, a simple bon voyage will do.

Look It Up

This was the week I learned a new word: sororicide.

You might think that since I only existed for a year and 18 days before being presented with the first of my five sisters that the thought might have crossed my mind previously, but you'd be wrong. You might assume that some time in the past 16 years of getting together for an annual long weekend with those five women, the weekend's events might have sent me scurrying to the closest dictionary.

But, alas, you'd be wrong there, too.

No, it was this year, a year in which it was my responsibility to choose the house and location for our get-together and do my best to make it as enjoyable a 48 hours as we are capable of having together, that I felt compelled to seek out the word that describes what surely has a precedent: sororicide.

Now that I think of it, perhaps the better application is the adjective: sororicidal. Why? Because apparently I have a sister who fights that urge when she's with me.

I'm not sure what, but something about me so annoys her on these trips that she begins throwing invective every chance she gets. The kind of person who when, in the course of a conversational game, is asked what the hardest part of the Sistertrip is and responds, "Not killing Karen."

Sets a bad tone, if you know what I'm saying. And I knew there had to be a word for it.

The good news it that the house I'd spent so much time choosing was wonderful. Set on 11 acres along Nomini Creek, with the Potomac River in the distance, it was a handsome, century-old house perched on a high bluff, with breathtaking water and island views and a dock.

The festivities got a delayed start when the only sister left to arrive called and said, "We've got a jumper." Sadly, just before she was going to cross the Potomac River, a person had decided to jump off the Nice Bridge. It was a bit of a bummer to start the weekend.

Besides the waterfront location, the thing that had sold me on the property had been the enormous screened porch, which had a fine brick floor and stretched the length of the house. On it was a table for ten at one end  - it'd be an ideal crab-picking location - and a grouping of four chairs and tables at the end closest to the water.

It was there that we began the annual rite of drinking, talking, laughing, reminiscing and arguing that fills the days and nights when we're together. This is where things can get dicey.

No one knows me quite like my sisters do - as my mother reminds us all too often - but since I've lived in another state from them longer than I lived with or near them, they really don't know much about me or my life at all.

Sometimes this becomes a problem, like when a sister slanders me with a less-than-factual story about me in high school. Come on, it's my life and I like to think I know what happened better than she ever could. Unfortunately, she states it as fact to the group, leaving me no choice but to correct her, which in turn causes her to act like the aggrieved party.

That kind of sister.

As children, Mom always said that the beauty of having a big gaggle of sisters was that there was always somebody to play with. As adults, the great thing is that one bad apple doesn't spoil the whole bunch. When one sister is a pain in the butt on a sistertrip, there are plenty of others to bond with.

Or walk down Memory Lane with.

This house came stocked with every game from our childhood: Twister, Go to the Head of the Class, Yahtzee, Monopoly, Life, but we didn't use any of them because we bring our own games.

Each sister conceives of a game or two, usually based on the family or traditions, that sort of thing. One sister did a matching game with images of places from our childhood like the library, the community pool and the building where we went to Girl Scout meetings.

Sometimes the game inspiration is more tangential, such as the sister who created a game where the objective was to identify the board game by its objective.

The objective is to be the first player to get all four of their color pawns from their start location to their home space.

If you weren't raised in a board game-playing family like ours, you might not know that describes the game of "Sorry." But most of us did.

What we don't always remember is the importance of using that word - "sorry" - when we're less than kind to those closest to us.

But after 16 years, I've learned such is the nature of sistertrips. Heaven help me.

When the World is Good

I've officially been away more this week than I've been here.

All the windows stay open while I'm gone and I water the inside plants while I'm here, but I'm feeling a bit like a house-sitter lately.

Yesterday's train ride to Annapolis wound up being 4 1/2 hours instead of 3, partially because the train was sold out at every stop (the conductor attributed that to it being Mother's Day weekend), meaning longer than usual times to load and unload at every stop.

But we also got stopped on a bridge over a choppy, brown river (being navigationally challenged as I am, I have no idea what body of water it was) because of a fallen tree on the tracks.

So we sat there for 45 minutes, waiting for a southbound train to pass us so that we could use that track since ours was, shall we say, incapacitated. And while I have no bridge issues, per se, it did occur to me that if that that other train ended up on our track by mistake, I was going to die a watery death.

But it didn't so I enjoyed the silence of the "quiet car" (seriously, I wouldn't sit anywhere else, including the business car with its higher price tag) to finish up my book, Oscar Hijuelos' 2002 "A Simple Habana Melody (from when the world was good)."

Granted, I hadn't read his "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love" since it came out in 1989, but this one struck me as undeniably more tragic with its detour into the tragedy of a man incorrectly sent to a concentration camp.

With still more time on my hands, I started another book, but soon realized that I'd better not go too far into it since I'd need it for the trip back.

Talk about a shame; no one should have to ration their reading.

But eventually I made it to my friend's house for a 24-hour visit that included a visit to the riverside crab shack Cantlers and a dozen extra large crabs enjoyed next to a couple on a date, a medic and a soldier, both of whom had recently served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

When they ordered the steamed sampler of clams, mussels and shrimp to start, they had no idea how to peel and eat shrimp, so the affable bartender gave them a shelling and de-veining lesson.

Needless to say, they didn't go anywhere near picking crabs like we were, a wise move given how arduous a task it can be if you don't know what you're doing.

My return train was far more timely with no unexpected arbor issues, and still leaving me a solid 3 hours to be absorbed in Jonathan Harr's "The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Carvaggio Masterpiece," an improbable NYT bestseller I'd picked up at the library giveaway last year.

While it didn't have the earthy, poetic fluidity of Hijuelos, who was influenced by another favorite of mine, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the art detective story was enthralling for how fate and tenacity both had a hand in leading several art historians to an important and presumably lost work.

By the time the train pulled in to the station, I had only 60 pages left and I was dying to know how it ended but finding out wasn't an option at that point.

A favorite girlfriend and her cute husband were having a party tonight to celebrate her getting her master's, so I needed to hurry home, shower and get to the soiree.

Only problem was that I'd never been to their house, it's in a neighborhood I don't know and one that turned out to be black as pitch with no streetlights.

I was pretty sure I'd found the right house when I eased open the front door and heard someone ask, "Did you just say you were going to be picking at your skin?"

The party was in full swing and the graduate grabbed me and said she'd feared I was dead when I'd missed Live at Ipanema last Sunday, but I'd assured her that I'd just been otherwise occupied.

Since it was my first visit, she gave me a tour of the house which was full of her husband's photographs, one of hers at a doughnut shop in Pennsylvania with a sign saying, "We specialize in holes" and a bunch of found photos, acquired at thrift stores, online and at Etsy shops.

One particularly intriguing one was a sepia-toned view of the Richmond waterfront near Tredegar with holes drilled along the edges as if it had once hung on a museum wall.

Both she and her husband are avid record collectors and while I glanced through their vinyl, that's an afternoon's activity all by itself. And I'm not even talking about the seven inch discs and cassette tapes or CDs.

Even the framed posters were worth checking out - a Dali exhibit, a Hitchcock retrospective, the first 300 albums released on SubPop.

And don't get me started on the camera collection, the giant record player or the photograph of every kind of microphone imaginable.

Their house was a delight and as a party guest, I had full rein to wander around and check out its details, all under the guise of mingling.

So, sure, I engaged with a group discussing restaurants and chatted with some new-to-me people about what they did.

At least right up until the point where it was time for me to go home to my own charming abode, at least for a few hours before heading out again first thing in the morning.

On the road again.

Ciao, Bella

It was a send-off with a garden motif.

Far, far away on the other side of the river, we enjoyed an early evening stroll through a series of garden "rooms."

There were decks (three, I think), ponds with fish (and tales of eating their own), vegetables galore (bright red peppers, squash as big as watermelons) and a story to accompany every bit of it.

Best line heard outdoors: "It was spawning season and the smell of sex was overpowering."

At one stop on the tour, we saw an array of motorcycles from 1978 through '81, including the one that had taken our friend on a 73-day odyssey spanning 12,000 miles.

Once we finished the full loop, we moved inside for a game of find-the-cat followed by a big, chewy Italian red wine, something I hope to be drinking a lot of in the coming weeks.

That's when things really got good and tales of misspent youth began to fly.

Best line heard inside and taken out of context: "Her mom asked me what my intentions were with her daughter and I said to keep banging her until she stopped screaming."

I think some of us were laughing so hard that tears were streaming since that had clearly not been what he'd said to her mom.

With a bon voyage from our entertaining hosts, we set off for a quick meal.

Sunday choices are always limited, no more so than after 9:00.

We slunk into Mom's Siam, hoping to grab some carryout without raising the ire of the kitchen.

It helped that another customer came in minutes later, looking just as sheepish and hoping to get her own carryout.

While waiting for our food, we told the counter girl it was our last meal before crossing the pond.

Without missing a beat, she said, "Then your first meal back must be here, too."

I'm not making any promises.

Hoy obb (steamed mussels with basil and lemongrass and a spicy lime juice sauce), Siam dumplings of pork and shrimp and chicken with pine nuts and mixed vegetables arrive in the seven-minute window we were promised.

Once home, I find messages from friends saying lovely things like, "Have such a splendid time!" and "Watch all you can, take pictures but first enjoy with your eyes, visit all you can, eat all you can, drink all you can, take your time, enjoy, enjoy, enjoy, don't think about Richmond."

You can bet the farm on it.