the past is sneaking up beside me

all of a sudden i've found all of my college friends...

my college friends - we had a weird fluidity of housing between the five of us, david, jake, mina, lynne, and i. luckily, since we lived about five blocks from one another that was ok.

luckily since new orleans in the summer molests you like a sweaty man at a rave and we had superior air conditioning we spent a lot of time at our house.

there was the summer of wine - a cheap merlot, talus, that we bought for the magritte-like label. we drank it on the porch. one night we drank a LOT of merlot on the porch and unexpectedness (none of it lewd or lascivious) happened.

there was japanese night where david and i cooked our way through the japanese vegetarian table for our friends. (complete with one very bad night that taught me sesame was forbidden forever)

there was sushi at ninja, which is the origin of the shirt which is the origin of the euphemism.

there was wandering hither and thither down maple street, buying books, drinking iced mochas from PJ's, getting a mushroom deluxe sandwich at favori, and dinner at that amazing, delicious, affordable french restaurant.

there was spontaneous poetry night.

and there was Porch Day (whoa, look out kids - she's broken out the capital letters)

the day that we sat on the porch from sunrise to sunset. we were allowed to leave the porch for tinkling, or if we needed something imperative to making porch day perfect. and later, so we could climb on the roof through mina's window. (i should scan these pictures)

i made 2 loaves of soda bread the night before. jake and i were on the porch at sunrise - the others were later risers.

we read. we told stories. we read stories. we drew. we took pictures. we took pictures of the impossibly tiny, impossibly gay man in the impossibly tight lycra sailor suit who was walking his impossibly huge great dane (whose back came up to the little man's armpit) down the streetcar tracks. we noted the odd number of tour buses who stopped to look at our house. we sang and played guitar. we wrote, songs and poems and stores. we climbed on the roof. we took pictures of mina blowing bubbles on the roof.

when the sun went down, we went inside and had dinner. it was a bird's eye frozen dinner in a bag dealio. i can't remember the name of it, but i remember we bought it because the woman at winn-dixie gave jake and me a coupon and mispronounced one of the words.

i remember. it was chicken voila. and she called it chicken viola.

that was a Very Good Day.