Story of the Day 6/ 26/ 2009

We had company for Shabbat. Not dinner company. No one would ask to come for that. But the sleep over variety.

That is what happens when you have a family of 7 in a 3 bedroom home and their out of town family comes and needs all of the beds and sleeper sofas- you get the overflow.

Since we literally have an empty bedroom- I mean empty of bodies, it has two twin beds, we are good neighbors to have, at times like these. SO we got the overflow of teenage boys. Two , or three. I told their mom that if she needed to send over a third, we could also find a place for him to sleep.

Of course, they were to arrive after dinner. This was smart, but it was also because they wanted to have dinner and visit with their out of town relatives who had kicked them out of their beds. And visit and visit.
And when it was 11:00, my family was all turning into pumpkins, and went off to bed, leaving me awake to answer the door.
This was okay, because I had a good book.
It was also okay because I am the only one who would have woken up to the knocking on the door- yes, the kids are deaf- so they have the perfect excuse to not hear and answer the door, and Larry has better hearing than I do, but over the years we have been married, I have learned that the reason he has a pager is so when a patient or the hospital or whatever needs to get a hold of him in the middle of the night, I will hear it and kick him till he wakes up. If it is winter, I can also use the pull the blankets off method.

Anyhow, I also have another talent, as well as being the only one who is talented enough to wake up for a knock on the door, I cannot fall back to sleep after I have been awoken.
I used to be able to, but after the couple of years of insomnia I had following the loss of our first child, it is a skill I lost.
So, I was sitting up and waiting for a knock on the door.
And then, at about midnight…..except, the person outside of the door seemed…well, awfully tall. I hesitated a moment, then opened it to our friend’s 18 year old son-not one of the boys we were expecting , but the son of a different friend - and this one is a couple of inches taller than our son- who is 6’ 1”.

“Hi, Daniel!”
“Oh, hi, ummm, are Jordan and Ethan here?”
“No, they haven’t come yet.”
“Well, I can visit with Aaron.”
“Except he has been asleep for an hour. But why don’t’ you come in.”

Hesitation.
Okay, I am not anyone’s idea of sparking conversation and company- well, maybe a cadavers.
“Do you want to go over and get them.”
This idea met with approval.

About 10 minutes later- not quite enough time for Daniel to have made it to their house and back, there was another knock on the door.
It is Daniel and Ethan.

“You ran into him on the way over there?”
“Yeah.”
The two very sweaty boys came in and collapsed onto the sofas.
Well, it was still, at midnight, about 90 degrees out. And humid.
They explained that Jordan has gone to walk his girlfriend over to where she is staying- several blocks away.
I said that it was good he did that. It is very dark out and , for a girl, scary to go walking around our rather unlit neighborhood, at this time of night.

Daniel told me, very seriously, “Yeah, I get scared walking around here. I was scared just walking over here.”
It is very dark, and there are no sidewalks and almost no street lights, but this is still quite an admission from a hulking 18 year old. Okay, maybe he has to gain about 25 lbs before he can be considered hulking, but still, who, in the dark, walking, would make you nervous if you spotted him.
“I was walking here, and it was dark, and there was this car approaching, and then it slowed down and then it stopped, and I was nervous and I looked over……
“ and then I said, ‘Hi Grandma!’”

Daniel’s grandmother also lives in the neighborhood.