Two Job Mama

I'm at work right now and that 80s song "Our House" is on the radio. (We listen to internet-streaming radio all day, and not that crappy lite rock stuff that's approved of in most offices. We listen to some crazy stuff, and good stuff, and old stuff and sometimes my partner Chris likes to play latin music that makes me feel like I'm at Don Pablo's. But I digress.) You know how songs can call up a specific time and place in your mind? Here's the visual that, for me, always goes with this song:

A guinea pig funeral.

Yep. A funeral. For a guinea pig.

I was about 9 or so and I was going on a weekend trip with my somewhat friend Hillary to her family's lake house. But the first stop was a couple days at her house in Fort Wayne. This was my first real trip away from home with people who weren't my family and, frankly, once I got there I was not too excited about it. For one thing, Hillary was a raging brat, a fact that I couldn't help but notice even at age 9. For another, I was worried about what we would be eating because I was a fairly picky eater. I wrote in my diary my first night there that I really wanted to go home. (My diary!? Who travels with a diary when they're 9? What a dork.)

On the second day we went to the Fort Wayne mall, which, much to my surprise, had an ice skating rink inside. I still have the scar on my thumb from nearly shutting it into one of those lockers where you have to shut the door and pull the key out at the same time. So after an afternoon of skating and looking at earrings at Claire's we went back to her house only to find that Hillary's guinea pig had passed to the great beyond. Hillary was distraught. I could have cared less, but I was the guest, so I had to go along with the tragic grief.

We ended up out in the back yard with the guinea pig in a shoe box and the family (and me) standing in a circle around its tiny little grave. And here's where the music comes in. Up to that point I'd never been to anyone's house where they had speakers that played music OUTSIDE. Like, whatever was on the stereo in the house was piped outside. They seemed rich beyond imagination to me. I mean, not only did they live by a mall with an ice skating rink inside, they also had a lake house that we would be going to soon AND speakers that played music out in the back yard!

We had a swing set that wasn't anchored in concrete and a membership to the Moose pool.

"Our House" was on the radio during the funeral proceedings and I distinctly remember thinking that maybe I'd better not sing along during the actual funeral, even though it was one of my favorite songs.

Along with the gift of having an eternal link in my mind between "Our House" and a guinea pig funeral, there were a few other things I picked up from that trip:
• a love for Golden Grahams cereal
• the knowledge that I really don't want to eat venison again
• the ability to water ski

All in all, not a bad trip.