Christmas 2005

I apologize to everyone in northern Illinois who has been slimed with my germs since Saturday at about 3:00 a.m. when I woke up feeling nauseous and feverish.

I have a very special strain of the stomach flu called the Christmas Stomach Flu that ensures that you won't remember Christmas morning very well because you are so desperate for the room to stop spinning. It also ensures that you are freezing cold, yet hot, and that you will hold up the present opening a few times while you "see a man about a horse" (as one of my English professors used to say as he'd sidle out of the classroom).

Add this to the fact that we left our camera (and video camera) at Cinda's house on Christmas Eve and that will explain why Quinn will have no memory of Christmas 2005. Sorry, Sweetie. It was a good one! I think!

I couldn't go to my family's Christmas get-together, and Quinn was (from what I hear) highly fried out as this was her fourth Christmas gathering, essentially, and all in all the day just couldn't end quickly enough.

Today, though, I was feeling a little bit better (if I didn't have to eat), so we went ahead and visited my friend Anne, who is in town from North Carolina with her husband Eric. Her sister Patti was kind enough to open her home to us so we'd have a child-friendly place to visit (Patti's children have 10,000 toys, but Quinn managed to pick as her favorite the one that little Claire had just received for Christmas and didn't particularly want to share), and Colleen and her family were there as well as another college roommate Paula, who I haven't seen in about 10,000 years. I wish they all lived next door to me, because we had the best time just yapping and yapping about nothing.

I can't believe that I've known Anne and Patti for so long. They really feel like family to me...when we were driving down to Patti's today (she lives in Tinley Park, which is a southern suburb of Chicago, and friends, that's a long way from McHenry, which is 10 minutes from the Wisconsin border) I was trying to explain to Andy what it was like to meet Anne and her family.

I was sent to college with a gallon jug of some off-brand shampoo and some generic deodorant and one plastic crate that was small and brown. The comforters that Colleen's and my mom picked out for us were from JC Penney and they were navy blue on one side and baby blue on the other. I mean, they were uuuuugllly. My mom just didn't do cutesy stuff, and I was pretty unaware that it existed, so I didn't know to pine for it.

I also grew up alone, pretty much, except for Dennis. My sisters were out of the house by the time I was into childhood, so I never had anyone's jewelry to snarf or nail polish to pilfer. It was just me and my frill-free mom.

Then I went to college and met Anne, who was raised completely differently than me. She worked, for one thing, a lot. She had her own money, and spent it on stuff. Good-smelling shampoo, cute jewelry, fun pens, highlighters, funky dishes for her dorm room, and (I was so jealous) Vidal Sassoon hairspray that smelled like heaven.

When I went home with her for the weekend for the first time, I was overwhelmed by the amount of people around her house that were our age. She has two sisters, two step-sisters and a brother. There were always friends around; there was yelling, arguing, and laughing; there was clothes-sharing; there were interesting products lying around that everyone shared; there was just all this GIRLY stuff on every surface of the bedrooms and bathrooms. And if they felt they needed more stuff, off we went to CVS or whatever pharmacy to get it.

To me, the girl with the half-used gallon jug of off-brand shampoo sitting around getting dusty, this was like a whole new world.

Andy asked me if I was jealous of this, and I don't think I was...I was just amazed that there was this whole other way of living out there. With people your own age nearby. With sharing of clothing, with working hard and spending your money on fun stuff. I was a really sheltered person, and meeting Anne had such an effect on me.

I still, to this day, admire Anne for her independence, for her work ethic, for her good taste in everything from shampoo to bedroom furniture to paint colors. I love hearing about her family, and I love that I feel so at home with them. I was really sad to leave today, because I know I won't see Anne again for awhile, and I know that Patti lives too damn far away for us to see each other with any regularity, either.

So many of my friends live far away from me...in other states, in far-away suburbs, or even just five miles away. I wish things were more like they were when I was growing up, when everyone in the neighborhood knew everyone else, and the moms would all hang out together in someone's kitchen until it was time to scurry home and make dinner.

If I could have a neighborhood like that, I know just who I'd populate it with.

Posted by Amy at December 26, 2005 09:30 PM