One of the things I miss is having one or more traditions to which to look forward. Or, in this case, I need to adapt an old one so that I can still have it in some form or another.
Last year at this time, I had this great phone network ready for when “American Idol” voting was in progress. On Tuesdays, it involved calls conferring over who was the best and for whom we would be sending text messages en masse to FOX. On Wednesdays, when the results were announced and someone was kicked off, the calls were usually to bemoan the tastes of the idiot teen-agers who voted for whomever they thought was cute instead of the singers with the real talent.
I had two phones, and I’d often have someone on each line, at each ear. There were three people in my phone network. The prior year, it was two. In any event, “AI” season was the one tradition I really had — I would bust out the heated foot bath/spa every Tuesday and paint my toenails afterward. Those were two hours that I was parked on my ass and shutting out the rest of the world to focus on me.
This year, it’s season four of “AI,” and everything is different. One of my phone buddies is now on the West Coast and doesn’t see the show when I do (although we’ve had some midnight calls to discuss other shows, but that means I can’t call and give any spoilers. Rats!). Another — well, we aren’t on each other’s speed dial lists anymore. And the third, well, I’m sure we will be on the horn, even though circumstances have dictated that I pull away for awhile because I don’t socialize when I’m in a funk. But, alas, said funk shall dissipate to allow for bitching about “Idol” contestants. 🙂 Now, to just figure out where I shoved the foot bath, because I am due for a pedicure!
But, it shows how everything changes so quickly. I was thinking about some other people I know. One gets together with a friend and ensures that they see every Oscar-nominated film before the awards ceremony. Another gets together with her girlfriends to wax poetic over the “Miss America” pageant — their dream is to actually attend the event, but for now, they have a spa night and giggle like schoolgirls, dreaming together about what they would do for the talent competition and how they would discuss their plans for achieving world peace. I love that!
Living in D.C. means that you have to be OK with the transience of it all — people come and go; most move away because it’s too expensive, and others fall out of each other’s respective circles for whatever reasons. Perhaps the one longstanding tradition I’ve participated in during the nearly three years that I’ve lived here is to not count on doing the same thing at this time next year with the same people, if at all. Not to say we won’t all catch up on the phone at some point and get caught up on the gossip eventually, but there was something magical about sharing moments that we could always refer to in future conversations and not have to give the whole background for the other person to understand what you were trying to say.
In any event, I hope this year to, among many other things, develop some new traditions with some new people. But, I’ll never forget the joy of spending the old traditions with people who made those traditions worth remembering. 🙂
On iTunes: Howie Day, “Come Lay Down”