Thoughts before midnight

Tonight my little brother and I drove to our aunt's 70th birthday party. It took us way longer each way than it was supposed to because both times we took the wrong route. It took, like, ridiculously longer that it was supposed to. We had been driving for an hour or more when we came to the sign that said we had 61 miles left -- the trip is only supposed to take an hour and 20 minutes -- and we burst out laughing because it was all that we could do. We passed towns we'd never even heard of. It was surreal. I thought we were driving to the ends of the earth.

Here are some songs we sang to pass the time, either along with a CD or the radio. I just want to write them down so I will remember.

--The first CD of the Rent soundtrack (original Broadway cast). He went to see Les Miserables on Broadway recently, after Daphne Rubin Vega had left, and he said, "If I would have had to hear her sing 'I Dreamed a Dream,' I think I would have died."

--"Vogue" by Madonna.

--"Don't Take the Girl" by Tim McGraw.

--"Hold On" by Wilson Phillips.

Already I am forgetting all of the songs. It was pretty great to see our cousins, aunts, uncle, and so forth. My sister wanted to come but was felled by a horrid cold that I think was brought on by her body's revolt of being driven from New York city to here on very little sleep. Hopefully she is sleeping soundly and will feel better tomorrow because she surely needs to go out for a pizza bagel. Soon she will be out of this country and far too far away from me. I am choosing to ignore that at the moment.

I am sleepy but awake. Overwhelmed with uncertainty following a school orientation about what the hell I am doing taking these graduate classes and what it would really mean to change careers at this point in my life when I don't even know if I want to? What? The fuck? Is the color? Of my fucking parachute? Feeling so amused by my little brother with whom I have so much utter fun. Feeling moved by all of the old photographs at my aunt's house and awash with memories of my late uncle standing over the stove making really good baked beans and watching my cousin get dressed for her wedding in an upstairs bedroom when I was eight years old. Telling her daughter this as the memory occured to me, wondering immediately after if it caused her hurt to tell her I watched her mother get dressed for the wedding to her father to whom she is no longer married. My cousin's daughter is a very sunshiney person, and I like her quite a lot. My other cousin showed me all of the wonderful artifacts in that upstairs bedroom -- the bed his father was born in that he is now sleeping in, a tackle box his father made as a little boy, an amethyst rock he stole from Pike's Peak one day in July when it was snowing, the toys belonging to his mother, my aunt, and her sister, my other aunt, that were found in his grandfather's car after he was killed in an automobile accident when the little girls were babies. That kind of stuff is what life is made of. They are "just things," but they are so precious.

It's all so precious. All of it, all of us.