Hurry Home Hoodie! Candi Misses You.



Hoodie fixing a fence. Uggs is reading to him from Surfer's Journal

Hoodie Meditating in his front yard. Smiling with his eyes closed.

Hoodie is our neighbor. We called him Hoodie for months between ourselves before we knew his name is Larry. Pat and I had decided before talking to him that we were pretty sure we wanted him to be our new dad. Collectively. Our friend Dan was into it, too. Larry, of course, does not know that we look up to him as we do.

I, for example, have learned a lot about chillllllllling the f#ck out from just listening to Larry talk and watching him day in and out come and go with an even positivity. He's had a lot of tragedy in his life but he doesn't see it that way. He feels lucky. He has lost a wife to cancer. He has survived thyroid cancer. He started surfing again in his late 40's after living inland since his early teens.

Larry went to see family for the holidays and Pat is hazy on the details regarding his return. Why am I such a puppy watching his driveway and listening for gravel disturbances?

Yesterday the across-the-street neighbors had tree cutters working in their yard all day. They gave a very impressive Fargo-sounding closing number with a chipper. Sunny acted like we were about to be bombed from above and didn't calm down until it was dark. Then she starts worrying about monsters instead of tree chippers and helicopters (she knows that one will crash on our house eventually because she's my daughter).

Anywhoo, Larry's not back and it's been longer than I like.
Sigh.

I have an adorable little mason jar full of Scandinavian Spritz Cookies (we renamed them belly button cookies because that's what they look like) with Larry's name on it right by the door so that when I see him I will run to the door and fling it open and then ...

I will look at Larry getting his stuff out of his adorably clean Honda CRV and think that he wouldn't want to be ambushed by a manic-depressive middle-aged frumpy woman and her strange cookies and awkward social interactions right after driving for hours and hours in his Larry-bubble of grooviness.

About 24 hours later I might be able to sneak across our skinny yard while he's loading up his surfboard for the day and nonchalantly offer him my jar of love.