like bookends

Ben and I traveled down to Lamar for the weekend to spend time with both our families. By a brilliant turn of events over only the last year, Ben’s sister Becki is now engaged to one of my best friends from high-school, Ryan, whose family has a bay house in Rockport as well (where he is living to finish up classes in order to apply to med school). Now when we go to Lamar, high chances hold that we may see our sweet sister and her lover, and I have yet to cease checking myself in awe at the situation of these two souls finding each other.

On Saturday morning, Ben’s dad indulged me in a jog around the bay (one of my favorite activities when the Smith’s visit). As we were running, per usual passing the time in conversation, he mentioned the idea of buying in Rockport since now 2 out of his 3 kids have connections down there. He mused that if someone had told him a mere 5 years ago that he would be looking at property in Rockport, he would have laughed, never even considering the option. How funny is it the way life turns out, so pleasantly different sometimes than our minds could have planned it.

Saturday night we ventured over to the Oysterfest for some raw oysters and a large dose of humanity (think people of Walmart plus a carnival setting). For a large majority of the time, I wondered around trying to find family members that I constantly lost by standing in line for oysters or something fried, trying not to knock people’s beer out of their hands and on to my white pants. At one point I even indulged in an only partially gnawed on turkey leg like a good ol’ festival goer—Ben tried to joke that the turkey leg was left by some previous patron of the table but I am 99% positive it was his sister's. Ben and I played some carnival games afterwards and won two goldfish, no mind that we probably spent about $10 trying to do so.

 Afterwards the Oakley’s (Ryans parents) invited both Starkey and Smith clans over to their house on Key Allegro for dessert of key lime pie and a rosemary rum bundt cake. I spent ample time in this neighborhood growing up (especially in high school), jumping from house to house with my little rag-tag gang of bikini-clad girlfriends over the summers. Most Fourth of July’s and a good number of New Year’s further chalk up my memory of this place, solidifying again my appreciation that Becki now has the joy of putting down some root here as well. As we drove home, I thought back to this passage in Walker Percy’s book The Moviegoer, where he describes how life offers us discrete packages of time in between two similar events, situated like bookends at some beginning and then again at the present. These “bookends” (the same event, spaced out over time) makes us consider mindfully all that has transpired in between their occurrence. I imagined my little 16 year old self most vividly, traipsing through these exact streets, so carefree and dramatically heavy laden with teen angst I am sure I even discussed with Ryan’s teen self, and now again driving back to my parents bay house as a 25 year old, with my husband (my best accomplishment in this time interval for sure), leaving his sister and her kids at Ryan’s very same house. Again, how funny the way life turns out.

 A little surprise waiting for us upon our return broke me out of my reflective appreciation of this year’s good fortune: Sister, or should I say Shitster, had exploded in her cage. Nice little ending to a great night. Really, though, we love her, and we hardly miss actually sleeping through the night at all.