Last week we celebrated my birthday. I turned 64 and it looks like my family will still be needing me and Jay will still be feeding me. Good to know! Most of the crew was able to make it for brats and cake. The house was full of people and after dinner and all the little kids had gone home, my Mom stayed later to play some cards with Katie, Nick and Josie.
It was a very good time.
Friday, we went en masse, to the Risen Christ Gala. It was the 30th anniversary of the founding of the school all our kids went to. They've had a gala every spring but we've never gone before. No good reason; just never made it. My theory is that we were always so consumed by March Madness that we never paid any attention to the emails and post cards regarding the gala and life was so busy we never made plans to squeeze it in but this year, Jay did. He made all the arrangements and invited the kids. Tyler, Megan, Katie, Zach, Sara and Josie, along with our friend, Lee, made up our table. The event was at the Depot in down town Minneapolis and it was an absolutely lovely evening! Josie is our youngest and she graduated from the school 15 years ago (15 years! I can't believe it!), yet we recognized a few of the people we knew from those days. One of the kids' favorite teachers was there, as well as some classmates and parents. I'm a little stunned that we all recognized each other after so long a time. Seems like yesterday I was ferrying Josie back and forth to school every day. The school is 5 miles from our house, on the other side of both the Minnehaha creek and 35W, which cuts through town. 35 was under construction during the last few years of Josie's days at RC and it seemed like we had to find a new route to school every month. Tyler and Katie had been students there since the very first year so by the time Josie graduated, we'd had kids at the school for 15 years. It seemed like forever. Now it's been over just as long. Life speeds up.
We all looked fabulous at the party. Naturally, I didn't think to get a photo of all of us.
I saw some nearly middle aged people whom I hadn't seen since they were adolescents, including Ben, who had been one of Tyler's best friends in grade school. In the earliest days, Risen Christ had two campuses; K-3 grade on the east side of the highway and 4-8 on the west, about a mile apart on 38th street. By the time Zach and Josie were there, the whole school was in the east campus but at Ty was in 8th grade, he and his buddy Ben had taken their bikes over to the east campus for some kind of event with the younger kids. When it was time to go home, they were told not to bike straight down 38th, so as to avoid the intersection of 38th and Chicago, which even 25 years before the death of George Floyd, was a notoriously bad spot in town. Like most 13 year old boys, they ignored the warning and Ty got mugged; his bike stolen. Ben had made it through without incident but went back to see what happened to Ty... and so he lost his bike, too. When the pair of them went into Cup Foods to seek help, they were just laughed at. Like I said, it was a bad spot, long before it became globally infamous.
I always though it was quite heroic that Ben went back to try and help Ty. He could have just run for the hills. We are what our choices make us.
The live auction raised over 250K. It was a good night.
The next day, Babalouie and Kitten came and spent the afternoon with me. We had pizza for lunch, baked cookies and since Babalouie had ripped his knee up last weekend in a scooter mishap, we opted for board games. I taught them to play Monopoly. The game I have is Lord of the Rings Monopoly, which is better than the normal game because there's an end point. Every time you roll a 1, the one ring moves a space on the board and when the ring gets to Mount Doom the game is over.
I had taught BoopityBoop to play a couple of weeks ago and we had a good time. The twins picked up the game very quickly and in fact...Boop cleaned me out. Playing with Kitten and Babalouie, I managed to win. The game didn't take all that long so Babalouie wanted to play again; just the two of us. Kitten went off to play with Coachie and Babalouie and I started over. Having played the game once, Babalouie was totally down with the strategy and methods of ruthless capitalism. He bought up all the property he could get his hands on, as did I, and when he landed a single monopoly, he mortgaged everything else he had, built his unencumbered property to the skies and then just sat back and bled me white.
I had forgotten some very important things about Babalouie: he's extremely coachable. He learns fast and he's supernaturally lucky. He had his one monopoly, covered in fortresses and I owned the entire most expensive side of the board. I, too, built my property up as much as possible...he never landed on it. He skipped down the board, landing on People or Events, dancing between one heavily fortified property and another, teasing me with his proximity, for which I could never charge him rent. I, on the other hand, landed on his stupid fortresses every damn time I came around the board. I wasn't broke when the ring made it to Mount Doom but we both knew I wasn't going to recover from the economic blows he'd dealt me.
I'm so proud of him.
This afternoon we watched Xena in the school play, in which she had one of the larger parts. All in all, it was a terrific week.
I feel like I could sleep for 40 hours but I won't. Now that the sun is back, there's too much fun to be had.