(She) Shoulda Quit You Long Time Ago

The last days of winter.  Made P some White Bean Soup with Spinach and Kale, zucchini to help with a lingering cough he's had so long, I'm gonna have to name it and have it pay rent.

The sun is out today and all the snow from yesterday's day long storm is melting. Sometimes it feels like the sun will never come back out.  And it's good we really have to miss it, makes it that much sweeter when it does return.

I recently decided to join Facebook to keep in contact with old friends and family.  I'm a major late bloomer and also prone to major mood shifts and have never been consistent with my thought patterns so for me, it's not been a great option for years.  But finding old friends is actually fun.  I found my first high school bestie and figured, hey let me dig a little deeper, find my actual very first girlfriend from grade school.  Ann A.

Ann always found me funny, so she was an instant candidate for kinship.  She also shared a major passion for drugs and alcohol super early in grade school years.  She had a gay brother, which was a double bonus! He was my sister's friend too and all helped form the beginning of my misfits social life.  We bonded early and remained friends throughout high school even though she would go on to get married.  I even visited a couple of times when I went back to the Fort.  We worked together after high school at a place called Value City Furniture where you could get a whole house load of crap financed and delivered in a day.

Ann loved so much to laugh and had an infectious giggle.  When I visited once she could not get over that I wore the exact same blouse twice in a row and that kept her amused for way longer than you could imagine.

In my defense, I was spread too thin trying to party my way through my hometown and ended up on my sister's couch the night before, not returning home.  Her and her husband had a cute little ranch house in New Haven and on the outside everything looked to be in order.  After the second visit though I realized they were both pretty strung out and maybe hadn't left the house in quite awhile.  I was there in junior high when she met her husband.  I was there to see her fall completely in love and morph like a butterfly.  She always wanted a boyfriend. He was everything to her. He looked like Jim Morrison and I thought Ann had done quite well.   He also shared the love of being in a permanent altered state and had an absentee single mother so we had this gorgeous house to trip in after school in the posh area of Blackhawk off Maplecrest Rd.  They loved hanging out with me and both found me hysterical, which was my only criteria for being buds. Ann was a scientist and from grade school, experimented with mixing interesting pharmaceuticals and common drug store items like dramamine for example with 151 Rum.  I was always game, so this continued through school and their courtship. They turned me on to all these interesting drug cocktails like crushing up a half a quaalude onto a bong hit and then washing the second half down with Blue Nun wine.  Ann found humor in everything except when she was working, then she was all business.  And by the looks of this ultra conservative appearing girl quietly doing the books in that back office, you would NEVER imagine she would finish a glass of wine let alone....I mean it was just too much.

Anyway, as you've probably guessed, I found Ann on the web.  She has passed.  At 51, she's just gone.  On New Year's day even of last year.  I've actually been trying to find her for a couple of years now but Google never rendered a find until today.  An obituary.  Come to find out her husband a couple of years before her and her brother before that.  All gone just like this bowl of soup. Sometimes the sun doesn't come back out for people and I am more than fully aware of that.  My later best friend B recently lost her own daughter to the same drug. I guess that's why I search so hard for more joy and hate when I become complacent and squander any more real moments funny or otherwise.

When I made this soup I wanted it to have everything fresh and alive and bring nutrients to P ailments, make him better so we could enjoy the day.  I think of Ann today and how I wish I would have found her Facebook page with tons of yellow smiley stickers and hundreds of friends.