Drive Thru Friendship

We had to meet fruzzin(friendcousin) Rowan in a parking lot because he was turning 12, quarantine or not, and we've gotten really good at parking lot meetings.

There is usually fast food involved, but today I had a lot of food from my school food job, so there was a trash bag of food for them, and then a birthday bag of stuff I found in the garage that had been unopened a few books unread or barely read and some paints and things that might keep a 12 year old feeling happy on his birthday in captivity. I also gave him 12 bucks because who wants a card without your age in money in it.

So in our parking lot by the abandoned movie theater, our two cars parked parallel with the van doors slid open facing each other, here's what captivity can't do to us - it can't stop us from looking well rested, or enjoying a face that we haven't seen in awhile and knowing that face has been with us at other places like the wide open beach and on rides at the Fair and flat out running to the Matterhorn at Disneyland (and later hobbling off saying man that ride is a shittyjerky bumpfest) and maannny days of watching the kids put on dance shows and walking from the park home in the rain singing -- these are all things from the gravity of friendship, and they're smothered on us like hot thanksgiving gravy on the cement of white hot homemade potatoes.

So fuck you Covid, and thank you Covid, for drive thru friendship. A parking lot is a fine place for laying out the life that has meant something to you, and to those people in the other car. Who cares if the birthday balloon is deflated and taken off the kitchen doorknob from Emma's birthday back in February.

It's still a birthday, and turning 12 on planet Earth? A ripe thing to do.