A visit from Debbie, part 1

Debbie was in town for a few days last week ... not just to visit me, but certainly partly so. (I think I mentioned this last month.) And in the end we were able to spend three evenings together -- not bad, considering she was only in town for three and a half days. 

She arrived Sunday evening, and we'd agreed to meet for dinner and a movie. But then she contacted me en route ... she'd be stopping by her ex-husband's house first to drop some stuff off and would I like to join her there? Then she added that what she was dropping off was some apricot mead from a place near where her mom lives, and maybe I'd like to try some. I took the hint and said yes of course. Some time later I realized that, well, if she was going to be visiting her ex-husband and his new wife in the house the two of them spent 20 years in, ... maybe she'd like to bring a date. So that was fine. We got there just about the same time, chit-chatted for a while, and tasted the apricot mead. Debbie visited with one of the dogs who still remembered her, and who was by now very old. And then we went on to dinner....

... where we bumped, quite unexpectedly, into some friends of hers that she was going to visit the next day anyway. So they joined us, and we talked at length. Her friends were an older woman named J, who had apparently known Debbie back in the early 1980’s and who had gotten her to move tothis town in the first place, and J’s daughter K. (K is maybe about my age. So far as I can think, I’d never met either one before.) The big news from J was that she had recently moved into assisted living, and that she was having memory problems. J (who is, I guess, in her 80’s) said her memory problems could be pretty severe, but to me it didn't seem all that bad: she carried the thread of the conversation just fine, but then she did ask me three times during dinner how long I’d known Debbie.

After dinner we saw Greta Gerwig's "Little Women". Debbie told me she had already seen it with her daughter, but wanted a chance to see it again. Also ... I'd never read the book so I didn't know the story before, but from what I had gleaned it seemed somehow fitting for her. The independence? The Unitarianism? I'm not sure. But we both enjoyed it. (And I'd still cast Saoirse Ronan to play Debbie in the "movie of my life" ... never mind the 40-year gap in their ages.)

The next night Debbie was having dinner out with some other old friends and invited me to join them again. These friends I had met before, back when Debbie and I were first dating. They are both good people and we went to a new Indian restaurant in town that was just amazingly tasty. Much of the conversation was among the three of them, though I found a couple points to contribute. Actually during one stretch I inadvertently made the conversation a little more lively than I was comfortable with. The conversation turned to the current free-for-all in the Democratic primaries, and as everyone else was giving their opinions I gave mine. I won't go into the details here; suffice it to say that I haven't been following the news too closely, and tried to say something funny and self-deprecating ... but managed to invite a lot of very earnest rebuttal. As I say, I'll skip the details. But, ... oops.

And then the next night was Sangha. Why don't I break here and pick that up in Part Two?