Everyone in the house got together for a home-cooked feat tonight. We spent the afternoon shopping for groceries, and came home to warm up by watching basketball, eating chicken wings, and shaking up fancy margaritas. After a 70-64 nailbiter, with Haryasz scoring career-high points for the second game in a row, we set to the kitchen. There was pan-seared ahi, sauteed asparagus, couscous, and an Australian white with a sweet fruity nose. A guest wanted to know whether the housemates did this every week, and though they laughed that it was only the first time, everyone seemed to feel that if they didn't, they should.
Then someone gets up from the table to answer a phone call, and when he comes back, it's to tell us his grandmother has had a probably-fatal heart attack. The jolting change in tone drops everyone into confused silence. He gets up to take a walk, and while he's gone another roomate tells us all for the first time about how he saw his father shot to death in a mafia hit. Another tells us how a relative was murdered and the killers got off, and how his father was stopped at the last minute from taking his own vengeance in the back of a bus. I'm dumbfounded sitting around the table; these are all smart, funny, well-adjusted young frineds of mine, with bright careers ahead of them and seemingly all the advantages available. Each one the picture of youth and promise. Even dealing with death in my family, I've never had mortality thrust so suddenly in my face, with such a sharp contrast to what came before it.
So it's Saturday night. Go out and live it up. Now.
1 comment:
Yep. In law school you're not entitled to whine to your peers because for every sob story you tell, someone else has a sadder one.
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