and comforters. Luckily, I had color coded all the towels the minute I moved in. Green for Yaz, Pink for Jules, tan for me and Ben. This might not sound important, but the devil is in the details and when you are a single girl, moving into a house with near strangers, towel ownership was a big deal.
Plus , I had to get both the laundry and the grocery shopping done by 1p.m. when Ben would be home, we’d change, and head out to Drew’s memorial service. It was such a shame that Jesse couldn’t come but I suppose being accused of murdering his father had to have something to do with that. Every time I thought about it, I cringed. Just the manner of death. Drano, or something like it, burned Drew’s esophagus while he laid comatose from pills. So someone fed him the pills and then fed him the Drano, or vice versa. Horrible. What people do to each other. Sometimes I swear Rodney King had it right, couldn’t we all just get along. Life is hard enough just getting laundry done, I mean holy bejesus, it is no wonder they don’t inject anti-depressants into the drinking water. Everyone I knew was on some pill or another. It’s like you hit age 37 and your hormones go wacky, your synapses stop firing and it takes pharmaceuticals to get it all right. I’d been known to use anti-depressants and over the counter sleeping pills myself. Anxiety, insomnia, irritation at being a stepmother, irritation at being not the perfect wife, slight depression, too much red wine, whatever the reason, and there was any mix of the above and I could have been the one in Drew’s position. Hand me that pill, hand me that glass, I could see it, drink it down, lay down and bleed and burn from the inside out and sleep right through it. Gah. Completely morbid. I had to stay focused on the fact that I only had two dryer sheets to do and three more loads. Reuse the sheets? Hmmm. Big, big thoughts.
After running around , I was completely sweaty and a little frenzied by the time Ben got home from work to accompany me to the memorial service. It was being held at Strunk’s, I was at least familiar with the place from my Aunt’s funeral last year. Funeral homes are always such sad places, and not just because of what they do, but because of the decor. Strange padded institutional seating, weird combinations of pastels, and now they all came with overhead projection screens for the “memorial” video/photo collage. And always too cold. I had brought my gold/brown wrap for just that reason . Plus it matched my heels nicely.
We pulled up late (Ben couldn’t find a tie , GAH!) and had to park much too far away, Drew’s was obviously not the only service that day. I was irritated cause I wore my pointy brown heels and the parking lot was less than level. Ben walked ahead of me , he has a much faster gate, plus I was hobbled my heels. Dang they look good but phooey, hard to navigate gracefully in. The eternal problem of good fashion, whatever looks good is NEVER 100% comfortable and whatever is 100% comfortable NEVER looks good. Why is that? These were my thoughts I thought guiltily as we headed in to Drew’s service, shouldn’t I be remembering good thoughts about Drew. Not that we really had many. He was a talker. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Both Ben and I developed a habit of ducking in our house as fast as we could whenever Drew was out front, cause lordy-loo, if you got caught in a conversation your afternoon was shot. Not such a warm memory. I could think about the time we saw Drew and Pam out at karaoke one night at Crossroads. That was fun. It’s always fun to see people do karaoke, to see what “songs” live inside them. I remember being surprised when Drew sang Krypotonite by Mario. I just didn’t see him as a “I wanna be your superman” kind of guy. But there you go. Everyone’s got someone else inside them that they want to be. Me, I’ve got a little Dolly Parton inside my soul, it’s my staple karaoke song, “Harper Valley