Thursday, May 22, 2008

The Price of Friendship.

So we are home from our whirlwind trip to San Francisco. Definitely not enough time. Not at all. We were real troopers on what we called the Midnight Wine Express Extravaganza. With our frequent flyer tickets, we flew in at midnight and out at midnight five days later. Traveling at midnight is what turns people into zombies, not the T Virus as Resident Evil video games will have us all believe. Fortunately, we thrive off each other … and off good wine. My Super Husband held me together and got me to all places in one piece. I repaid him by forcing him to walk uphill in San Francisco for many miles. Death eluded us much to our surprise, and Mr. Husband swears he’ll never walk uphill in Noe Valley again. I have good money riding on that bet. He secretly likes to walk until he's dizzy. He does.

Here we are after walking halfway up and down and up again one of San Francisco’s city streets that move like music—the Grateful Dead were underfoot at all times. Unfortunately, I think Mr. Husband thinks most of our time was spent in drums>space. I tell him it truly was the rollicking end of the second set. Regardless of where exactly our many miles of street-hill-hiking took us within a Dead set, we were smiling the whole time. That’s kind of unavoidable. We made each other laugh to avoid the tears of pain. We are stronger people as a result. We can move mountains. Well, at least, we can move ourselves.

We had two awesome hosts while vacationing in San Francisco’s Noe Valley. We took up space at Petar’s place. Years ago, I’d nicknamed Petar the “Man Mountain from Yugoslavia.” Petar sat next to me in the next cube at work when he first moved to Birmingham. He’s Tall. However, my Mr. Husband gracefully eclipses the Man Mountain by 2-3 inches. (Yeah, that’s all mine.) This photo of us on our way to the Giants game on Friday night shows how crushed Petar is by the obvious height superiority of Mr. Husband. Here he jumps to try and seem not so small and Napolean-like next to Mr. Husband the Man-Who-Laughs-at Man-Mountain-for-Being-Short at a measly 6’4”. Good thing we understand that Petar can’t help being short. We love him all the same. He took damn good care of us regardless of height.

The other host is My Moser. I’ve known Moser for over eight years. I knew of Moser before I knew Moser. Prior grad school, I worked at my present employer for five months before leaving for two years to study English. I worked on the bottom floor of the company, and all the girls would talk about “the hot guy” on the next floor. They were referring to Moser. Moser was like this being of mythic hotness proportions. When I came back to work after grad school, he was the guy everyone talked about … but he was on vacation in Jamaica. I never really knew that “the hot guy” had a name. When he came back from vacation and I was introduced to him, I blurted out, “Oh! You’re the hot guy.” For some reason, that made us fast friends. I’ve been Moser’s “wing man” for over five years. No one can sell Moser like I can sell Moser. Here he is in typical Moser fashion: wishing he was a bear with a blackberry in his hand. He never stops working.

One reason Mr. Husband and I are drawn to both of these great hosts is that we all have a penchant for working hard and totally loving our jobs. And when we stop working to relax, life is about laughter and friendship. We share our lives with a familiar and humorous openness. I was surprised that Moser wouldn’t lend us his car. What?! Like, I’m totally not responsible at the wheel, but my Robot Husband is the picture of responsibility and way better than Rainman at driving up and down a driveway. I was offended. Moser seemed to me to hem and haw about how Mr. Husband wouldn’t fit into his new compact Scion vehicle. I, of course, didn’t believe him. I silently accused him of stinginess (which is, like, the opposite of Moser). Finally, on Saturday, Moser took us to his vehicle to show me what he was afraid of: Mr. Husband’s knees were up around his chin and turning the steering wheel was going to be either embarrassingly pleasant or incredibly painful. Here we are realizing that Moser is smart and not truly stingy.

We both of us want to thank our awesome hosts. We walked. We laughed. We drank wine. We didn’t drive Moser’s tiny clown car. Petar and Moser made sure we saw the important points, like Twin Peaks and the Giants. They made sure we were comfortable in unseasonably warm 100 degree weather in San Francisco. They helped us to have something of a second honeymoon at a time when saving for a house might have kept us from a proper vacation. Sure, we’re lucky in that whenever Mr. Husband and I have a moment alone it’s totally like a honeymoon swirling in the air we breath together, but going somewhere special makes it about many orders of magnitude romantically better.

Good friends are priceless.

1 comment:

facingthetrend said...

My favorite post yet. What a trip that must have been! Le sigh.

--Deborah