Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name

There are days, and I'm having quite a few of them lately, when I am profoundly disappointed by my inability to make close friends in Austin like I did in Sherman, and like I thought I did in Las Vegas (but after I moved realized I really hadn't).

However...

There is definitely something to be said with being so very comfortable with a group of people that you know and who know you so that you don't have to explain things. Inside jokes and obscure references and all that.

For example, a few months ago, D and I were talking when Mal got upset and started wailing (remember: he doesn't have a "middle," he only has glowingly cheerful or full-tilt breakdown). I could see D blanche and start to head back to her room.

I hollered after her, "So you're just like Voldemort?"

Grinning, she said, "Yes. Exactly that."

Then more recently, I went into Mal's room to tidy up and saw some plastic change from his cash register sitting on the floor. I picked it up, opened the register, and called to James, "I'm afraid this register till is going to be our smiley face mushroom." James laughed from the other room, and my heart fluttered.

It's so centering to be able to throw things out and just have them "gotten," and then to feel gotten myself. Home is the most important place, and I'm so blessed to share my home with people I actually enjoy as people. They make up for everything else that I might feel tugging at my heart sometimes. 

So... There's a line in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, just as, in a flashback, Voldemort is about to try to off Baby Harry, that says, "He did not like it crying, he had never been able to stomach the small ones whining in the orphanage—" And that's how D is like Voldemort. Well, that's one way.

The other thing is a lot more obscure. 

First: Mal has a cash register. When we were setting it up, there was some disagreement about how to put the money in the drawer. My inclination was to put it with the big bills and big coins on the left, going down to the pennies and one dollar bills on the right. It seemed like that's how we did it when I was a cashier. James' inclination was to do it left-to-right like you'd write numbers 1, 5, 10, etc. I looked it up and, yeah, the proper way to do it is how I wanted to do it. This pretty much never happens with numbers and me, especially when James is involved.

However, James still likes it the other way better, even knowing it's not the way a standard cash register would be set up. Consequently, almost any time he's alone with Mal playing in Mal's room, he will rearrange the money in the drawer. Then I have to re-rearrange it correctly when I notice this.

Second: Go WAY back in time to high school. I often peppered my notes with smiley faces (actually, I still do this). My smiley faces are just two vertical lines for eyes and a half-circle for a smile. Like this...

Well, one of my friends like to do this thing. He'd add three lines to my smiley face, thusly...

Then turn it upside down and, voila:

MUSHROOM!

Don't ask me why, because I don't have an answer, unless it's that I was a hormonally-charged teenage girl, but his defacing my smileys made me inordinately angry. It just miffed me to bits, and I would blanche and get really hot and bothered and seriously, if I want to do it, I can mentally go back there and kind of feel the dark cloud gathering above my head. 

Thank God I'm so mature now, though, right?

But my point is this: James knows my stories. I think he knows all of them. I get so sad sometimes (again, lately I've been pretty maudlin), wishing we could have been together all of this time -- especially on days like today when I decide that the bb cream I'm using actually accentuates my pores and wrinkles and I wish James had had years to look at my face back when my freckles were still flat on my face and my skin was all one consistent color.

However, we must have gotten something right, because I think we managed to tell each other everything and catch up on twenty years before we had Mal. That's a good thing, because we barely finish sentences anymore, much less whole trains of thought. 

There's not really a point to this post; just wanted to remind myself now and in the future that I have good teammates on this journey. I'm so glad.