the 29 cent dinner party

i love inviting people i hardly know to dinner. tonight it was amy and her three year old daughter, aurora. we met earlier this summer at spruce pool while i was teaching harper the back float. amy had a nose ring and was wearing a one piece. sometimes that's all it takes. as it turns out, aurora goes to sunflower with harper and when i came to school this morning, amy recognized me immediately. we chatted about our kiddos and about guys and about how much our lives had changed in just a few short months.

come to dinner. tonight. i said.

i simmered while amy chopped. we listened to the girls trouncing around upstairs as we waited for the inevitable crash followed by the long silence followed by the loud cry. aurora had clocked harper with a microphone. harper was irate. aurora was conciliatory. we served as reluctant referees as we each kneeled down to soothe our children with one hand, holding big glasses of red wine in the other.

no harm no foul.

as we ate, we preemptively moved items around the table as to avoid spilled glasses of milk; elbows in tomato sauce. it was all very matrix. it always is. amy talked about her junk food eating relatives from south carolina. i told her of my worry over my mother's chapped hands. they are so beautiful, it's hard to think of them being anything less than perfect. we grazed politics, preschool educational theory, and current dating philosophies. i don't want it to be a total skin show any more, she sighed. i nodded, promising myself to reuse the words "skin show" as soon as humanly possible.

cut to harper and aurora covered in chocolate followed by our hand washing, brow wiping, cheek kissing, and soft pats on bottoms: now shoo!

after the dishes, after the wine, harper comes in with a pile of records- a bunch of the 29 cent numbers we bought last year at bart's upstairs. pleeeease mama, she says.

cut to this:



then this:



then this:



and so on and so forth.



now it's late. our guests, our friends, are long gone. the record is over, doing its scratch, scratch thing. harper's sleeping under my wing and doing her lip parted thing. and i'm staring at the ceiling wishing someone was there to put on the next album.