I had finished the regular work last night, and was working on proofreading the Faith and Gaming collection (which I finished earlier this afternoon), when a call came from a young lady, a dear friend of one of our sons who has found herself living in our living room (odd that it should fall to that purpose) before.  She had been evicted from her apartment, an hour away in Philadelphia, and needed to move herself and her things immediately.

I agreed to get her.  I called my wife, who was finishing up at work, to let her know my intentions, and she said to wait until she called me back.

Oddly, while I was awaiting that call, I came upon the old article, Faith and Gaming:  Friends.  I say it is odd, because the piece recounts another night, years ago, when it was my wife who was taking the truck to go help a friend in need in the middle of the night, and I who was accommodating her.  The article speaks of unbalanced ledgers, and how it is not the point of friendship to look for balance, that what we gain does not always equal what we pay.  It was an interesting and indeed timely reminder.

My wife insisted I take the boy along who is most closely her friend, and he agreed that he should go despite the fact that this would mean being crowded in the unheated cab of the truck.  We at the time did not know how crowded, nor how complicated, this would be, as in addition to the girl we also picked up a cat in a carrier and a ferret on a leash, and there was no place to park along Tenth Street south of Mifflin in Philadelphia even at one thirty in the morning when we arrived, so I was sitting by a fire hydrant with the back end of the vehicle extending into an intersection for most of an hour while they first carried boxes and packages to the truck and then attempted to coax a ferret out from under a neighbor’s balcony so he would not be left behind.  We also had to feed the young lady on the ride home, at almost three in the morning when all we could find was a McDonald’s Drive-thru, even in so busy a place as the Deptford Mall area.

I neglected to mention that our eldest and his wife, who missed Easter with us because of his work, managed finally to make it down, arriving minutes before the phone call which took me away.  They were still here when I returned; in fact, it was after four when I finally got to bed, and they were still here when I awoke shortly after five to get boys to buses.  Thus I did not see much of them, but my wife did, and that’s a reversal of the usual circumstance, so that’s good.

I probably did not get eight hours of sleep before I was folding laundry (another thing I tucked into that time) and trying to start my day, but I’m not slowing down yet.  I have a Collision rehearsal tonight, and it happens to be Baxter’s birthday, so I’ve asked our resident cook if he could make a cake just in case Baxter makes it.  Meanwhile, I’m hoping to get everything else out of the way sooner rather than later, so I’ve got time to do some other stuff at some point.

–M. J. Young