13 February 2008
The day before Valentine’s Day, the prepared deliveries start to really pile up! At The Rose and Thistle, the orders that are awaiting their delivery time, are collected in a neighbouring store space where they are arranged by zip code, and drivers can come and go without having to interrupt (or deal with!) the rest of the craziness at the main shoppe.
It’s a beautiful sight—all those flowers in one room!
After working a ten-hour day, I headed to the airport to pick up Ginger. She has just spent a wonderful four-week holiday with her mom and other assorted family members in Florida! The first words she said to me as she came out of the airport terminal, were, “Brrr . . . it’s cold!” Welcome home, my dear! We missed you!
Then, after dropping Ginger and her luggage, safely at her house, I picked up Kyle at our house and headed to No Frills Grill, where we were meeting our friend, Steve. Steve is another of those folks that I’ve known for so long that we can barely remember the beginning. We went to TCU together in the early eighties! He pledged the band fraternity our freshman year, when I was dating a senior, and I can remember pledge paddles and silly parties. Then, I was a part of the band, too, when I danced with the Showgirls, and there were rehearsals and football games and bus trips and basketball games. We lost touch with each other for quite a while . . . then, suddenly, there he was, working at the warehouse where I had to go every week to pick up comic books for Heroes. We really got to know each other better during those years, and when I was single for a while, we even dated. Kyle met him there, too, as Steve was working his way up the corporate ladder, to location manager, and finally, as the industry imploded in the nineties, he relocated with the company to Baltimore. Since then, we keep in touch via email, and we try to see each other when he comes home to visit his Dad.
So, we sat at NFG and reminisced about TCU and our mutual friends there, and about the comics industry and all the changes there. We had a great visit, and called it a night around ten-thirty, since the flower shoppe on Valentine’s Day needed me to be at work early the next morning!
This is a busy week!
~MB
