Anything for you, dear

 One of two female buddhas,  White Tara at the
Tashi Choling Center for Buddhist Studies, down the road a piece

"With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come."  

- Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

The first official convention, minus one or two.  Event shirts and everything!

So the fifth Jenny Creek Cafe convention and dance-athon is now in the archives.  It was probably the most ambitious production yet, but at the same time simpler because we'd done it four times.  This is purely conjecture because I didn't really do any of the planning.  I was flattered because the location was chosen (in part) because it is near Ashland (Oregon, about 140 miles north of my town), where I traveled to absorb a little culture and gather with my siblings,  but I could still get there in time for a bedtime drink snack on the first day.

There's my mountain, looking south out our windows

"Heaven & Earth" is a beautiful, sprawling house in the rolling hills right on the California border with big bedrooms for almost everyone and a vast kitchen/dining space where we spent most of our time cooking and eating.  (If you decide to look, the "master bedroom" was mine, but only because one couple had to cancel.)  The single unpleasant surprise was an inadequate refrigerator which required daily additions of bagged ice to keep our food from going bad and poisoning us all.  I realize it's bougie to whine about no Wi-Fi, but there was also no air conditioning and the first two days were well over one hundred degrees outside, rendering us too sweaty and lethargic to dance much, but we compensated by enjoying our booze on-the-rocks instead of neat.  (Sadly, being sweaty and lethargic is almost a given in this, the happy hour of our lives...)  There was a walkout basement level with a family room (and most of the bedrooms) which was nice and cool and an excellent place to gather to watch  M and Dr L's African safari slideshow, judge the crusty heel contest, play a few hands of Name-That-Symptom,  or sing along to the Music Man.  (We are still perplexed by what appears to be at least a twenty-year age separation between Marian [Shirley Jones] and her little brother Winthrop [Ronny Howard], who was clearly Mrs Paroo's change-of-life baby.)

Yes, we are still hungry

The salmon cook and the pizza cook

There was plenty to eat, which is like saying there was plenty of air to breathe.  Despite each superb meal starting the instant the previous one ended, I brought home SIX bulging sacks of groceries as well as several bottles of wine, and only partly because the other Creekers either had to fly home or drive too far to make toting home leftovers impractical.  I won't have to shop for quite a while as long as I'm not too particular about the combinations on my plate, and so far I'm not.  However I really miss the coffee elf who not only brought along her own Santa Cruz blend, and who also drew the short straw and slept on the couch,  but got up before dawn to start the first pot of the morning.  I'm the elf at my house but I'm not nearly as doggone cheerful about it.

The under-functioning refrigerator photo-bombing the shot

From the Cafe's inception we've counted two spouses in our numbers--indeed they are charter members--but this year the circle expanded to welcome two more husbands (Neither of whom had avoided us on purpose, mysteriously, necessarily, it just seldom worked out that they could make the pilgrimage.)  Both of them had a great time or are skilled actors; either circumstance obviously makes for good husband material, in my somewhat impaired opinion.

  We might be Susan and Sharon, if Hayley Mills had actually been two people 

Once again I drove home with the sweet taste of bone-deep friendship on my tongue and the delicious warmth of laughter in my heart.  I guess one good thing about being this age is that the days will fly by and next year's reunion will be here in the blink of a presbyopic eye.

former-girl-child subcommittee meeting over cocktails

Sunday evening stragglers (me in a Kikoy channeling my inner  African queen) enjoying a thundershower

We're so dang real, we even have a logo.




~This one's for Thunder.  Sleep well, old man~