My Cousin, Vinny's

I feel like I've been waiting a year for Valentine's Day weekend, ever since my long lost cousin Becky and I made plans last month to try to meet up midway between her place out in Shippensburg and our apartment on the stygian shores of Trenton.

It's remarkable how slowly time seems to pass when you're eagerly awaiting something: Did anybody else's January last for like 11 weeks? And then maybe another 6-8 weeks just to get through the first half of February?

I think there was some groundhog skulduggery going on here or something...

But anyway, Saturday the 15^th finally arrived!

Becky and I touched base the day before, to iron out the details...

Her boys had three lacrosse games that afternoon---with a possible championship game to boot, if they qualified.

And, since I'm not super familiar with the Hatfield area (aside from passing through en route to Kutztown many times back in the day), I mapped the address of the sportsplex where the kids' games were, and I skimmed through photos and reviews for a bunch of the surrounding restaurants to see which ones could answer yes to two basic questions...

1. Do you have seating to accommodate all of us?
2. Are we likely to survive eating your food?

I found a pizza place, a pub, and a Mexican place, and sent my findings to Becky with assurances that Kitten and the Molerat would be good with any of those.

She got back to me and said the boys were pushing for pizza.

Then I had an epiphany and looked at Athennia...

We had almost an hour's drive to Hatfield—

—so I had insisted that we get on the road by 3:00 P.M. to ensure that we'd be there at a sensible hour (even if we ended up having to kill some time at Wal-Mart or a dollar store while we waited for the boys' championship game).

Good thing though—because Becky texted me just a minute or two after we got in the car, to say that the boys' team had not made the championship game; and so they'd be good to go on their end by 4:00 or so.

Then again, my six more weeks of winter decree was officially shooting us in the foot...

If you watched My Cousin Vinny back in the day, you learned what Positraction is...

And, if your first car happened to be a mid-80s Firebird—with a wimpy inline-six that couldn't even cough up 90 horsepower, such that the guys at GM concluded there was absolutely zero need for any safety or performance features—then you also learned what Positraction isn't.

Honestly, who put all these curves on Swamp Road?!

This entire drive gave me PTSD from my high-school and college winters, man!

Fortunately Kitten's Focus is front-wheel drive—and 32 years newer, with fancy things like seatbelts and ABS—and so we made it to the highway without any issues.

In a rare occurrence of reverse-speeding though, we subtracted 30% from the speed limit—which is always a bummer to have to do.

But soon enough, we were there just the same...

Becky and company arrived about five minutes later; and we spent a wonderful three hours eating and hanging out, with the entire place basically to ourselves.

Xander and Brantley were naturally pretty zonked from three back-to-back lacrosse games; but they were still hilarious and seem like they're probably a riot on a normal day.

We grown-ups caught up on how everyone's doing—and how we've all been doing in the ~15 years since we last spoke or saw each other: I had only met Ryan in passing one time at my cousin Jenna's college graduation party; and of course, he and Becky had never met Athennia. So we all swapped stories; and I asked about Aunt Joan, and Becky asked about Kelly and my parents

Then we recalled some childhood memories for Athennia's and Ryan's benefit... my favorite being the one year (maybe fourth grade?) that my family had come to visit at the end of the schoolyear, but Becky still had one more day of class left...

And so, someone had the half-serious idea that me tagging along with her to school might be more fun than hanging around my aunt's house by myself all day (especially if Kelly ended up going over to play dolls with Jenna all day or something)...

So my Aunt Joan had basically been like,

And my mom was on board with that—I guess because,

So, Becky and I hopped on the bus and took what felt like a three-week tour through corn fields and cow pastures—at least to me, being used to walking all of six minutes to my elementary school two blocks away.

Then we got to school, walked into Becky's classroom, bummed an extra chair from the computer table along the side of the room, and sat at Becky's desk together until the bell rang...

...At which point the teacher walked in, and seemed to think absolutely nothing whatsoever of the reality that there was suddenly some random kid in her classroom today—even though she'd never seen me any other time in the previous 162 days of school that year—and instead, she proceeded right into Drug Time^TM.

I sat there dumbfounded as she literally handed out to pills to every kid in the class—me included—and everyone except me just nonchalantly popped them down their throats.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, these were just fluoride pills—since everyone out here would have been on well water—but, at that age and in that moment, it was definitely a curiosity that my cousin's teacher was straight-up trying to give me drugs!

And of course I wanted to discuss—in more depth than I had bothered to put in my letter to Becky last month—the circumstances that had caused the distance between us coming out of the 1990s...

I'd figured that was better saved for a face-to-face meeting, and I'm confident that that was the right play: Becky, Ryan, Athennia, and I had a great conversation with lots of heartfelt honesty but no accusations or defensiveness

I walked away feeling like we all got to give and get at least a modicum of long-overdue clarity on a few things... And, after we finally said our goodbyes, the first thing Athennia said to me when we got back in the car was, "Yeah; so, Becky came across as totally genuine to me."

And I had been thinking the same thing all evening. It was a perfect reintroduction :)

So, just like this picture of us that I sent Becky when we first started talking again last month...

But, I gather from Becky that my Aunt Joan is taking her little brother's recent death even harder than I imagined she would :(

And my sister's employer thinks she's MacGyver and has given her a paperclip, two raisins, and a three-person staff with a combined IQ of about 62 with which to manage a complete dumpster fire of an operation; so, on a scale from 1 to 10, her stress level is about at a "King Louie"...

So...

Maybe that's a road best trodden slowly. In both directions.

And that's okay.

Finally, we asked our waitress to snap some pictures of us just before we headed out. These are my two favorites from the ones she took on my phone...

Riley, Athennia, me, Becky, Xander, Ryan, and Brantley.

Then, just like on the drive to Vinny's, there was no real direct route home; so, I figured we may as well spend the same time we'd spend meandering through windy country roads in the dark, and just stop by my parents' for a bit instead (and then proceed home from there on a route we know well enough to do blindfolded).

The "wintry mix" had switched over to rain by the time we finally got home; and we were relieved to find an open parking space on our side of the lot—at least, that is, until we got a closer look...

Ah—our chucklefuck neighbor Ruth strikes again!

And of course my response would have been to back in next to her and hug that line while sitting shallowly enough in the spot that she wouldn't be able to get out without going forward and jumping the curb in the morning.

But Athennia didn't want to put in the effort—even when I insisted that I would stand in the rain and guide her, millimeter by millimeter.

We made sure to tell her security camera to "learn how to park" when we got upstairs. And incidentally, the cameras we ordered arrived earlier in the day; I just hadn't had time to set them up before we headed out to Hatfield...

...But one day soon, one of these bad boys will be at our front door too...

...So that our camera...

...can watch Ruth's camera...

...watching us...

...watching her...

...continue to be an ignorant sack of shit every day.

In the meantime though, the only real eventful going-on for the rest of the weekend was a crazy windstorm that looked like this...

...and also like this, once my camera decided to focus on what I was actually trying to photograph...