First of all, I want to wish everyone a blessed Midsummer, which was on Sunday when I was in Staten Island. Pagans celebrate the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, when the sun is at its highest point before it begins to slide into the dark half of the year.It's been a fairly eventful few days, but I'll be brief about it because a lot of it is rather personal. Thursday night I drove into the city and picked up Polina from work to meet Lori at the Baruch Performing Arts Center to see Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. We arrived a bit late, and the play was only an hour long, but it was an amusing and surprisingly conventional drama, despite the flamboyant title.
Friday I got a call from my friends Mandy and Anna from Ohio and they were in town looking for work. Things have been very difficult for them in the past few years, and they had been living out of their car for the past three or four days as they traveled here from Columbus. I went to meet them at a nearby gas station, filled up their tank and brought them back to my apartment and got them cleaned up. We talked about their plans to live and find work in New York, and I called my poly friends Barbara and Sylwia (who both work for social services organizations) for advice. We called some shelters, but the fact they are a lesbian couple and they had a pet rabbit with them made it impossible to them to find a place where they could be together. In the end, I bought them a car charger for their depowered cell phone, gave them enough gas money to make it back to Ohio, and sent them home so they could drop the rabbit off at Mandy's grandmother's house before making another try at a later date.
Friday night I went to my family's house for our weekly dinner, and we had a donut party with Dunkin Donuts while watching Richard Attenborough's masterpiece, Gandhi, which was nominated for 11 Oscars and won eight, including Best Picture in 1983.
Saturday Polina, Katie and Afiya came over to finish our Firefly/Serenity marathon and have dinner with me. We made a salad with tomatoes, green olives, mushrooms, artichoke hearts, bell peppers and croutons, tossed with Italian dressing. I made spaghetti with a meat, mushroom, onion and fresh tomato sauce, and a simpler version of my stuffed mushrooms as a side dish. During the movie, we had tea and brownies for dessert. Afterwards, we dropped Afiya off at her home in Jersey City, while Katie and I spent the night with Polina in Staten Island.
Sunday morning we had breakfast with Polina's parents and grandmother, and the three of us took a walk around the neighborhood before the clouds opened up with rain. We waited until the rain stopped around 4 p.m., then dropped Katie at the ferry terminal so she could go home to Brooklyn. After dinner with her family, Polina and I talked, cuddled, listened to music and surfed the net until about midnight when I finally left for home. We found a new term for our relationship - amitié amoureuse - which in French means "in-love friendship," and I found a cute poem describing it:
Une amitié amoureuse
between my cat and me
while she sits on my lap and purrs
denotes a love that's free
of competition with the rest
of others whom we may desire,
for neither wishes to contest
the right that each has to aspire
to other lovers in liaisons,
though amoureuse our friendship knows
that every heart has got its raisons,
as every garden has its rose.
