30 Things in 30 Days: Thing #26—A Quiet Evening at Home

My work station we set up so that I could work on my denim quilt while we watched movies. It was fabulous.

Our original plans for tonight were to go see Men In Black 3 at the drive-in and let Hollie sleep in the car while we stayed up late. After a day filled of doing this and that, the evening rolled around and Hollie got nice and cozy in her pjs and we finally decided that the only thing more awesome than a drive-in movie would be a nice, quiet evening at home.

So we did it. We stayed home.

I immediately changed into my pajamas, and David left to pick up our take-out Italian. Meanwhile, I pulled the dining room table into the living room and set up a work station for cutting out patches for my denim blanket that I am working on (the work station was Dave's idea). After tonight, I have somewhere around 100 7x7-inch squares—not nearly enough! (The denim blanket is a huge labor of love for me. The jeans are all from my high school and college days, and I can tell you specific adventures I had in each pair. Almost all of them have holes in the knees or safety-pins holding the cuffs together. Even after getting cut up into squares, I can still tell for the most part which pair of pants each square came from. I have an almost unhealthy obsession with my past blue jeans, in the same way that I get weirdly attached to good pairs of sneakers. I mostly hate my jeans now, mostly because they aren't nearly flared enough for my taste, and I'm in that terrible halfway point between jean sizes that always results in a saggy bottom or a fly that won't stay up. Terrible, terrible. But the jeans in this blanket............oh my. What stories they tell. I hope I can make a blanket worthy of their memories. Anyone out there with advice on denim-blanket making or patterning, your words of wisdom are welcome here!)

Anyway, we put Hollie to bed, ate our grub, and watched Sleepless in Seattle on Netflix, a film that only just recently came up in a conversation between me and Dave a week or so ago. The entire time we watched it, I couldn't help but realize how differently I watch this movie as a married woman than I ever did as a single gal.

It is still a good movie, a great movie even. Not perfect, but really great. Really enjoyable. It's strange, though, to remember watching this movie at countless sleepovers as a girl, sighing over Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, waiting for them to meet up on the Empire State Building just in the nick of time. I saw myself as Meg Ryan, secretly impatient to grow older so that fate could line me up with an adorable widower with a clever young son. The part about Hanks's wife dying was sad, but necessary for the story, an unfortunate happenstance that paved the way for the real love story between Meg and Tom. I was uncomfortable with all the scenes that focused on the dead wife, because the more interesting story for me was the one about all the crazy coincidences between Meg and Tom that proved they were meant to be.

Of course, I, too, believe in something like meant to be. Though I would never put it in those words. But there is something quite odd about the way David and I got together. So many random moments of chance—it's really quite horrific when I sit down to think about it, about how many dominoes had to fall into other dominoes in order for us to have met at all (and, even after meeting, how many chance encounters occurred, how many brave and even seemingly stupid-at-the-time emails had to be sent in order for true love to begin to stir in our hearts that night at the Chicago Hilton.....). The really wild part is how well Dave and I really do fit together. We had both dated many people before finding each other—I think it is safe to say that we both began to question our ability to really find what it was we thought we were looking for. It's easy to empathize with Meg Ryan trying to make things work with poor old Bill Pullman. And, now that I've met David, it's easy to empathize with the unaccountable interest you can have with someone you barely know, but who just seems like he is meant for you. When Ryan hires a detective to spy on Hanks, I couldn't help but recall my own secret blog-stalking of David when I was suddenly terrified that he was meant for me (terrified because of my own nearly-serious boyfriend at the time, as well as my own gap of a dozen or so states between me and Dave). I do think that there is something to sparks and epic loves and heavenly orchestrations of people meeting people (though I don't believe in one-true-loves or soulmates. Well, I think Dave is a soulmate, but I'm sure both of us have other potential soulmates out there. I prefer the term kindred spirits. Bosom buddies. You know, blood brothers.)

My point is, I don't watch the film for Meg Ryan anymore. I watch the film now for Tom Hanks.

From my perspective now, the movie is less about finding true love and more about bereavement and the frightening possibility of ever having to move on from past true loves. I admit that I carried my heart in my throat the entire film, biting my lip so as not to cry so that David wouldn't feel bad about me watching this movie (I have terrible fears at night that something will happen to rupture our lifelong vows to each other prematurely. Even though I have a strong religious faith that our family will remain united even after death, I also know that mortality is still a long time to have mourn even a brief separation from loved ones).

Still, the film isn't dark; to the contrary, this movie is comforting and cathartic. And though it is about moving on, it isn't about losing the past love. The way I see it, the film is about how human hearts are large enough to be capable of loving more people without mitigating the love you carry for people already. And I believe that myself.

Now, if you'll excuse me, all of this blogging is getting in the way of my quiet evening at home.

Oh, and for Mom Gilliland and Mom Grover, here is a bonus picture and video of Babalooboo. She kind of crawled today. She crawled, but not predictably, and only a few feet at a time. She mostly just tries to stand up over and over and over again (to no avail). The video was us trying to capture the crawling, but she won't do it on demand. Still, it is a good minute or so of a cute baby doing cute baby things.

Trying to stand. It's hard in footie-pajamas on a wood floor, it ends up.