Blebbziversary 14

Friday marked the fourteenth anniversary of Sue and I transitioning from co-workers-slash-friends to others of significance. Unable to celebrate on the day itself, I made a dinner reservation for the following “night” (5:30). We opted to trek to a smattering of familiar spots in advance of our meal, but only after she borrowed my electric trimmer to rid herself of a few pesky, non-pink nose hairs.

When Sue declined visiting an Asian grocery store a town over from home, I grabbed my phone to access the GPS while driving.

“Don’t mind me,” she said. “I don’t like my life anyway.”

Brief trips to Vernon and ManchVegas—where a truck forced himself into a line of traffic and I mockingly said (in my best Toyota Tacoma-driving voice), “I’m pulling out, so suck my dick,” an unintentionally dirty zinger—ended at Salvation Army in West Hartford, home to the smallest collection of used books ever seen in a donation center. Next door to it was the curiously named Niki’$ Dollar.

“You never see a dollar store named after someone,” I said.

“Even our buddy at the mall named his place Dollar N Things,” Sue replied.

Splitting off to inspect Niki’$ ware$, I quickly became disappointed and searched for m’lady.

“They don’t have any candy here,” I told her. “I don’t trust this place.”

“Really? Alright, I’ll be quick.”

Awkwardly escaping any conver$ation with Niki on our way out, the seagull$ we’d seen when arriving had made an impact neither of us noticed earlier.

“This parking lot is covered in seagull shit!” I announced.

“Are we near an ocean?”

“We’re in WEST HARTFORD!”

“Oh yeah. Well, uh, maybe they smell the Long John Silver’s down the street?”

“Then why wouldn’t they be in the Long John Silver’s parking lot?”

“Good point. Fine, you win.”

“There’s the Peruvian restaurant I went to with Nicole.” I pointed across the street.

“There?” Sue’s brain remained in the plaza where we were.

“No! We didn’t dine at Blast Fitness.”

Talk about a Pyrrhic victory: I won the loss of Sue’s common sense.

A stop at Whole Foods led to Sue playing Nice Dentist, Mean Dentist with her future cavities and a container of chocolate chip cookies.

“You wanna touch them to see if they’re soft, huh?” I asked her.

“Yeah. They’re six dollars!”

“Dude, there are way too many people around for me to cover you.”

“Fine! I’m getting them anyway!”

Dining at a vegan place across the street—I requested organic corn starch straws (our friendly waiter’s introduction to my sarcasm)—we ordered appetizers before Sue began looking at a Specials menu featuring one of my archenemies.

“I am SO OVER TACOS!” I said.

“When were you under tacos?” Sue retorted in hysterics, reminding me how I’d long found tacos bothersome.

Upon returning from the bathroom, I grabbed my Talking Points list from my pocket notebook to discuss a few things of interest from the week that was since we’d last gotten together. (We both make such a list each week.) As I looked at the fifth bullet point, I was starting to regret my seagull-centric ribbing of Sue.

“Looks like I wrote down Tacos,” I shamefully disclosed while showing her the list. “I completely forgot about that.”

Sue nearly cry-laughed, a dining trademark of hers, as I confessed how my mother made hard-shelled tacos a few nights prior, leading to me breaking up the shells and eating them deconstructed because I hate how messy they get.

“You are the only person I’ve ever known who hates tacos,” Sue said.

Boxing our half-eaten entrees so we could sample Oreo cheesecake and coconut flan for dessert, Sue proceeded to relay a story from her weekly Talking Points. She explained how her friend Dave had once eaten so fast that it caused him a fake choking sensation. Mucus built up in his lungs after he rapidly ate a hot dog; had he not puked it out, he would’ve died, which seemed unrealistic except Dave’s dad had incurred the same issue numerous times—now there’s a man who could’ve won a speed eating contest but not made it to the podium to accept the trophy—plus Dave’s friend’s mother had died from it. (Note: If you ever need to kill Dave or those in his inner circle, visit a buffet.) Sue and I Googled “choking to death lung mucus disorder name,” but it offered little scientific assistance. Luckily for us, other pressing issues were at hand.

“Look at them,” Sue said about a nearby couple. “Not speaking and staring at their phones.”

“I don’t wanna glance and get caught.”

“You won’t. They’re too busy checking out memes. That’s what they’re called, right? You’re obsessed with them.”

“What? No, I’m not! I mean, I do like them, but still.”

Remembering my car was parked “in Ethiopia” (per Sue), or the area of the Whole Foods lot furthest from the store, I made light of my usual fear of the sanguine scooter being towed.

“You hear that? The tow truck that towed my car just returned it and is now towing it again, so I get a second ticket!”

Inquiring about a Five Below cashier’s obsession with EyeBuyDirect’s variety of rainbow-colored prescription spectacles and the hair dye preferences of a seventeen-year-old brunette cashier at Michael’s provided night life excitement before we returned to Sue’s abode. We settled in for cupcakes, truffle popcorn, and some stand-up comedy, but not before Sue asked if I was interested in installing the new toilet seat she’d received in the mail.

“I’m going to need a flathead screwdriver,” I told her while decoding the two-step, word-free instructional image on the toilet seat box.

“Let me go grab one from Dryer Room.”

A few minutes later, Sue reappeared from downstairs with four flathead screwdrivers, a serrated knife, and one unexpected item.

“I brought a fork just in case.”

“A FORK?! WHY?!”

Removing the old seat proved easier than expected, but things took a sudden, fretful turn when neither of us could lift the hinge covers on the new one, opting to repeatedly claw at the plastic from the incorrect direction, unwilling to take a hint.

“There are people with 50 IQs who would already have this thing installed,” I said after five minutes. “They’d laugh at us and say, ‘Hope reading Tolstoy helps when you gotta shit in the sink tonight, asshole!’”

Once the new seat was installed, Sue used the toilet fork to eat one of her Jane Doe-flavored cupcakes. (No, they didn’t taste like an unidentified woman on the FBI’s Most Wanted List; that’s what the bakery dubbed the vanilla and chocolate confections.) We viewed half of a Michael Che special, reluctantly praised Kyrsten Sinema’s taste in chic dresses, and spent far too long pondering the pros and cons of dental work and colonoscopies during a pandemic. 

The clock creeped into the Wilson Pickett Hour (midnight, non-music nerds) and Sue was ready to flip on a mindless sitcom while easing into sleep. She thanked me again for the McDonald’s floral display I’d surprised her with earlier in the afternoon—red roses and yellow tulips—before we briefly chatted about next weekend’s plan to visit Maine. It may not have been the type of anniversary you see in the movies, but it nevertheless yielded a joyous atmosphere you could cut with a fork.