evening with large

Yesterday, I took R.K. through a workaday evening on the Peninsula. He is in town for a wedding - a delightful wedding for which I was his plus one, more on this later. I worked while he wandered around San Francisco, Ferry Building to Fort Mason. At six, I picked him up from the Palo Alto Caltrain and drove in local and highway traffic down 101 to the Google campus, where with our chatty tour guide we enjoyed a cauliflower pinenut spread on cheese toast and banana chocolate mousse, and encountered a living wall, a solar-powered trash compactor, a collapsible fence made of polyethylene paper, and comfortable nooks full of intelligent-looking young people working past work hours. After touring the foosball table and the mystery pair of socks on the floor, we turned the corner and found two people playing at a grand piano.

We left. At my house, R.K. sung a soft tune and plucked out a few notes on the banjo while I thumbed the pearl of my Blackberry Clitoris looking for fires to put out. Dad set up R.K. in the extra bedroom and booted up a 2001-era desktop so that R.K. could be forced to view family photos. Boo remembered R.K. from Brooklyn sleepovers and leaned hard against his legs, begging to be patted. I coaxed my toes into the five-fingered shoes that R. had lent me, and Boo and R.K. and I walked the hundred yards to Grandma's house, where I applied tapotement therapy to her shoulders with an 18" daikon and Grandma told a story about losing a bunch of radios while doing her daily tai chi exercises in the schoolyard of Taiwan University. Obedient and well-mannered R.K. gamely carried on his end of the conversation and offered his name, but Grandma misheard him, gestured widely with her hands, and referred to him as "Large" several times. On the slow walk back home, Large and I stopped at a mystery spot that smelled like jasmine. We tried to delineate the edges of the sweet smell, sniffing the air in three dimensions until Large said he was going to pass out.

I subjected Large to P90x's Chest and Back disc. He stopped after half of the DVD, saying he was going to throw up. "I ate too much," he said. I believe you, Large. He sunk into our twenty-year old gray pleather loveseat and watched me finish the exercises and transition into the ab-ripping portion of the evening's festivities. I told Large of my parents' and my shared love of useless tschotskes, how a year ago S. said she would not permit me to bring any of these beloved trinkets into any shared household we would have, how I reduced my toys into one tissue box of useless crap, and then dumped out said box of crocheted sushi, rubber Cup o' Noodles, a baseball inscribed with the Constitution, a Barack Obama face towel, a Swan Lake music box, a miniature mace, a plush rat, and a $3.99 spinning Made in China LED toy onto my bed. We played with these while talking about relationships using terms like "aromantic" and "family love."

I had to wake at 7:15 for an East Coast conference call, so afterward I roused Large and we had breakfast at my favorite diner in town. I accidentally ate roughly 15-20 egg whites while Large said things like, "A hash pie is basically a potato pancake, except with bacon because it's not Jewish." I am pathologically unable to not chat so I flirted with the sixty year old lady at the cash register about buying Pez dispensers on Valentines Day, and then I drove Large three hundred feet to the Caltrain, where we did not hug goodbye because I anticipated seeing him up in the city after the work day. Well, the work day has left me wasted and I am unable to drag my tired ass north, so a remote hug from Palo Alto, dear Large, and thank you for visiting.