May 20, 2004

 a fun night in chapel hill

if you know ray, you know that he loves astronomy. i got him a telescope for christmas last year, and he told me it was the best present he's gotten since he was 6 years old. (that gift was a little motorized car for him to ride in, which --i have to agree-- is pretty damn cool.)

he spends hours looking through the telescope at planets and stuff (can you tell i'm not as into this as he is?), but his all-time favorite activity is to spot the new moon. he has a big book full of astronomical data that makes my head hurt just thinking of it; among other things it graphs out each new moon and how old --in hours-- each month's crescent will be. the younger the moon, the thinner the crescent and the harder it is to spot.

he tells me this is an ancient game, trying to spot the new moon. he usually asks me to go with him to look for it, and i usually agree. for me, though, the entertaining thing is watching him get excited; i rarely do any helpful spotting.

anyway, last night the new moon was 19 hours old. ray was all jazzed because it would have been a record for him (i think the youngest he'd spotted previously was 22 hours). alas, it was cloudy and rainy last night so he couldn't have even spotted the sun if he wanted to.

too bad for him. but good for me, as the cloudy skies freed me up to go hang out with mary a little earlier than planned. so we decided to use that extra time to drive to chapel hill for a night of reminiscing.

we first headed to pepper's pizza, which definitely brought back a bunch of memories. mary & i met each other while working next door, at the one-time record bar (which oddly remains one of the best jobs i've ever had), and we used to spend a lot of time drinking endless pitchers of beer at pepper's after we clocked out.

mary & i talked about the good ol' days and marveled over how pepper's salads are still as good as they used to be. (the pesto slice rocked, too.) we also ran into paul and his son, as well as ruby and her boyfriend. it was comforting, the whole experience, and reminded me of that feeling of... of being an essential part of chapel hill. 8 or 10 years ago i felt like i knew everybody there. i went to all the shows, all the parties... i knew everyone and felt like i really belonged there.

it's weird now, thinking back on that time . i'm not sad for it. i don't miss it. it's more an interesting anthropological issue for me to ponder... i was once a crucial element of chapel hill. and now i'm not. it seems almost counter-intuitive, but i think my life is actually richer now. it has more depth. but it was a nice feeling back then, that feeling of belonging.

after we finished our pizza mary & i decided to go down to the west end wine bar, which is another place we both like but rarely visit anymore. i had an incredible shiraz and a spanish rioja, which brought me up to a total of 3 glasses of wine in just a few hours (i had one at pepper's, too). it must've loosened up our jaws, 'cause both of us just talked and talked and talked. the wine bar was not crowded... just perfect.

we noticed that there was a competing wine & coffee bar about 10 doors down... it was totally empty except for the 2 people that worked there. it looked kinda cute. maybe i'll go back and try it out one of these days.

pfft. yeah, right... before last night, i hadn't been to chapel hill in a month. and that was for a rock show, which i showed up for and then left town again. it really never occurs to me to go to chapel hill and linger... but now that the students have all gone home it seems like a more appealing place. in fact, maybe i'll take joy there one night next month while she's visiting.

goodness, this post is getting long.

on the way home from the wine bar i noticed that i had a message on my cell phone from my brother. i immediately thought, "they had the baby!" but when i dialed into the voicemail that notion was immediately squashed... apparently rob has learned to preface every message with, "nope, no baby yet", and only then continues with the reason for his call.

i phoned him back and we had a great conversation (the wine was still lubricating my jaw), and though i can't exactly remember what all we talked about i do recall laughing a lot. i was sitting in my car (it was already 1am and i didn't want to wake ray with my drunken, loud voice), i had the drivers seat reclined all the way back and my feet were sticking out the window, and i just lay there in the perfect spring night and capped off my evening with a jolly conversation with rob.

Posted by xta at May 20, 2004 10:12 AM | TrackBack
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