Christmas comes but once a year... which seemed sad when you were a little kid, and now, if you're anything like me, you're irrationally grateful that it's only once a year. What occurs each year, for the past few years anyway, is I begin the christmas season lambasted by requests of all kinds for pastry items. This is par for the course, as I am in fact, a pastry chef, and therefore entrusted with all sorts of irritating holiday traditions both in the workplace, and at home. At home is one thing, because they're your relatives, and like it or not, you love them, or know you're supposed to act like you love them, and so you do what you must. At work, it's pure irritation, and little reward. Although this year I managed to finagle a mug with the company logo on it. I am now considering it my christmas bonus. This year however, I have one truly lovely tale to tell you about my at home Christmas experience.
I arrived in the Indiana to find that my mom had a new SUV that was apparently designed to look like a space ship, my dad still had lots of choir appearances, and my brother is still a good ol' boy in training, and seemingly happy about it. It looked like nothing had really changed. Relieved, I settled in to the bizarre situation that is Christmas in your hometown, when you haven't lived there for years. After we ate, and took my suitcase home, I then set out with my brother to meet his friends at a local bar. I cheerfully beat his friend Cullen at pool, and was quite satisfied with the evening. The next night, we were supposed to go out again, and I was at home after lovingly/resignedly getting ready for Christmas eve dinner the next day. I had been told that Brian would "holler when he knew what was going on." Apparently this meant that I was cool enough to hang out with him and his friends for the second night in a row.
At around 11:30 I get a call from the younger brother:
"Joe's coming to pick you up," a statement, not a question.
"I'll put on some shoes...?" I said.
"K," he responds.
Joe duly picks me up and informs me, while smoking, and driving around my neighborhood so as not to be on actual city streets while smoking up, that we are going to Brickyard, the bar attached to a new titty bar downtown which is called Scores. The hilarity of this doesn't sink in, however, until we arrive, and there are cops outside, and there are off duty strippers everywhere, and I am getting doggedly hit on by a really tall, drunk, bald man while my brother and friends laugh at me. One of the bartenders was in my high school graduating class, name long forgotten, and I resolve to look it up when I get home. (It was Roxanne Martin - I think we had World History together.) Of course you all know where this is heading. Of course we end up in said titty bar. I can't stop laughing - I wasn't ever, at any point, very drunk, but the absurdity just kept me laughing. After we'd been hanging out, and laughing at each other's disgust that my brother's ex-girlfriend's cousin is one of the strippers for an hour and a half or so, in walks my old friend Chase.
Chase and I were best buddies in the neighborhood back before boys had cooties, and we purportedly planned our wedding at my mother's kitchen table sometime in the late eighties. He actually brought this up, at the strip club, while we were discussing old times. He's still cute, and didn't really seem to mind how I look these days either.
I don't know if we'll ever get married, but we've been texting ever since.
There's more to this Christmas story of mine, I certainly have material for a few more posts, but I decided to put my best post forward, and I'll keep you informed about Chase...
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