The Deathly Hollows

I took the day off from the coffee shop yesterday to celebrate Ella's tenth birthday. I couldn't believe how unbelievably sentimental I felt all day, remembering exactly where I was a decade ago. Laboring through the night with the full moon, calling the midwife at dawn, lying under that gorgeous cherry tree, the unexpected ride in the ambulance past the coffee shop where all my knotty headed, patchworked friends were sitting drinking iced coffee and wondering when the hell we were gonna call them with the big news. Holding that incredible small bundle in the nook of my arm as that same moon came in from the window, lighting her up as it still does these years later.

As it turned out, when 8:58pm rolled around last night, ten years following the birth of that little girl, I found myself in a big room with big noise pumping from about a thousand different video games. For years Els has wanted us to take her to a place called Pizza Putt for her birthday.... an indoor mini golf course, enormous indoor jungle gym, batting cages, driving range, laser tag and really bad food. It's kind of like an amped up Chucky Cheese. I've never been able to rationalize taking her there for her birthday, in the middle of July, when the sun is shining and the days are long and the river is the perfect temperature. But yesterday's big plan included hanging out on Church Street in Burlington in anticipation of the new Harry Potter book being released... so Ella, to her great joy, was able to take two of her girlfriends to get rowdy, rifle through tokens, score tickets and trade them in for lots of cheap, plastic shit from China.

We bagged doing the release party on Church Street and opted to keep our business local but we kept our Pizza Putt commitment. Afterward, we drove home from Burlington, quick milked a cow while the girls changed into a strange concoction of fairy renaissance wizard garb, and loaded up the Suburu to drive into Johnson.

Tom was in the front seat with me, taking charge of the new Ipod to keep me from swerving all over the road and poor Bill was crammed in the backseat with the girls. I say "poor Bill" only because I had just spent the last hour serving my time in that backseat on the way home from Burlington. I was still feeling a little naseaus.

I got pulled over about two hundred yards from Main Street in Johnson. I was driving ten miles over the speed limit, which just got dropped from 35mph to 25mph so he let me go with a warning. I think he pulled me over because he saw all those heads in the backseat and was maybe hoping to nab some partying college kids coming from Johnson's one and only bar. I cannot even begin to explain the look on this young cop's face when he glanced into the backseat to find those three fairies in their velvet head wraps, sparkling wings, glittery faces and flowing dresses. And Bill.

And now we have the new book but I can pretty much figure on getting to it sometime in November... when my life frees up. Maybe.

Happy Birthday, Bean. Ten years riding this Earth around the sun.......making your mama proud.