So, the boyfriend’s away for a month. We’re thinking of it as a pseudo-vacation, although he’ll be working the whole time he’s gone. If there were a word comparable to “summering” and “wintering” to describe taking up temporary residence in spring (“springing” obviously doesn’t cut it), that would be what he’s doing.
You see, life in New Orleans requires a good bit of patience even in the best of times, and these, alas, are not the best of times. That’s fine for me–I grew up in moderately large, moderately loud family, so I learned to play the waiting game–but the boyfriend…. Well, it’s probably good for him to be somewhere with fully funcioning banks and bookstores and supermarkets and not so many FEMA workers who, six months later, still haven’t mastered the concept of one-way streets.
As I drove Jonno to the airport on Friday afternoon, he cracked his window a bit, reached over and pushed in the cigarette lighter, pulled out a smoke, waited for the lighter to pop, and lit up. It was a perfect Proustian moment. Watching and hearing and smelling the whole process, I was zapped back to my childhood, piled into a maroon Oldsmobile diesel station wagon (this was before vans and, subsequently, SUVs became de rigeur) with mom, dad, my brothers, and dozens of paperbacks (I was an insatiable reader before college and grad school made books seem tedious), driving toward Disneyworld or Savannah or Gatlinburg or Dallas or wherever the parental units decided we ought to go on our family vacation. In the passenger’s seat, mom would crack her window and pull out a Virginia Slim. Dad–a devout nonsmoker–would instinctively roll down his own a bit and sigh. Mom would push in the lighter and fiddle with the 8-track, then there’d be the pop and the scent of seared tobacco, sometimes accompanied by a little crackle as the cigarette lit. For reasons unknown to any of us, her nicotine cravings peaked when we were stuck in traffic on a blacktop road that was bubbling from the 95+ degree heat. The effect was stifling, but somehow comforting, too. I’m an avid secondhand smoker to this day.
That has nothing to do with anything, by the way–least of all Jonno leaving–but it’s Sunday and nothing’s happened yet except that one of the dogs puked in the kitchen, but I didn’t think anyone would want to hear about that.
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