We received a lot of gifts when Noah was born. Beautiful blankets, adorable sleepers, lots of books. We treasured each one.
Brian and June (and Zoey) DeWagner gave us a gift that I will never forget. Brian, a gifted writer, wrote a post about Noah. He took the things I like about myself, the things I treasure about Adam and distilled them into a picture of Noah when he grows up.
If he turns out half this cool, I will be one happy Mom. Thanks, guys.
A quote I found by Brian on his blog, “the Bleacher Life:”
When people say that, “life isn’t fair,” they’re right, but you can still react to that unfairness in a way that fights for equality and justice…for fairness. What happens to us is out of our hands but how we react to it isn’t. Accepting that life isn’t fair is absolving yourself of the responsibility to do something about it.
Of course, being Brian, he also lists this helpful piece of advice just above it:
Try not to put yourself in a position that makes it necessary to use a toilet amoungst 70,000 other people. On most occasions it ends up being a bad idea.
I had a dream about Piccadilly porch the other night. I don’t know what triggered it, but it put me into a melancholy mood, heavy with reminiscence that lasted long after waking. I kept thinking about the profound (drunken) discussions about the world that porch hosted, and the jam sessions that turned into debates that turned back into jam sessions and finally into almost complete incoherency by the time morning came.We believed we were so profound, so enlightened, so in tune. Maybe we were, maybe we were full of shit. Didn’t matter, I guess.
Officially, there were 5 of us that lived in that house at the end of Piccadilly, dangerously close to Molly Blooms and as close to EOA as you could get while still being west of Adelaide. Brian and June, Matty, Colin and me. Cooper lived on the couch randomly throughout the year and Keith took the other couch during hockey playoffs since he didn’t have a TV. It was never uncommon to come out of your room and find people you had never met sleeping on one of the 5 couches, but we liked it that way.
It may have been a house of inside jokes and stupid pranks, parties, childishness and general mayhem (I distinctly remember the quote “Can someone get the door? This is illegal!”along with other such proclamations of our collective lack of common sense), but a lot of serious connections were made there too. I met my husband while I lived at Piccadilly and, almost in the same week, Colin met his wife. Brian and June are now engaged to be married, and last I heard Matty and his beautiful girlfriend at the time, Jenn, are still going strong, in Australia, no less. I learned what it really meant to have Colin as a best friend, and he still is, to this day. It would seem contrary to think that at a time in our lives when we seemed to take very little seriously, our serious life was happening all on it’s own. Maybe it’s not contrary; maybe it says something about how seriously we should all really be prepared to take ourselves, anyways.
Cheers to the things about Piccadilly that we’ll never forget: Debu and Chuki, Molly’s on Mondays, Kegs & Eggs (and raw clams), The quote wall, watching the annual Michigan/Michigan State shindig on the TV we pulled out the window on the porch, waking up with a parking barrier slanted across the kitchen, Pearl Jam or Bust, Campasaurus and Quest and never having peanut butter in the house, the beer bottle alarm system on the window with no lock, Jam sessions and Matty’s itty-bitty guitar, ringing the porch with bottles of JD, Trying to wash the cat, and, of course, many, many spontaneous mind-blowing porch session where we discussed the world, the beer, the weather, the government’s foreign policy, Einstein’s theory of relativity and was that a G-chord or a C-chord in Wheat Kings?
