A little birthday contemplation

Singing along to: Xavier Rudd, Messages. It's kind of a preachy song, but I bought it from iTunes anyway because in the refrain he sounds exactly like Paul Simon and...apparently just listening to the real Paul Simon isn't enough? I don't know.

***

My twenty-first birthday was on Monday, and since I went home for the weekend, it turned into a low-key three-day celebration. On Sunday night we had family over for dinner, and that was nice*, and on Monday night I hung out in a friend's trailer and drank tea with creme de menthe and ate cake, and that was nice too.

But the best moment of all, for reasons I cannot quite articulate, was actually fifteen or twenty minutes on Saturday night. The house was quiet, and James and I poured ourselves some Bailey's and sat crossed-legged, knees touching, looking at each other over the rims of our glasses.

"We're grown-ups now," he said. "That's hilarious."

"I know," I said. "Who let that happen?"

And we laughed, because it is funny. Oh sure, we probably have a long way to go before any real adult could call us grown-up with a straight face--hell, before we can call ourselves grown-up with a straight face--but we were fifteen when we met. Sixteen when we started dating. We have grown up since then, grown up and grown together. We've faced a few storms in that time, and we're facing another setback now, but for fifteen minutes on a Saturday night we got to live in our own future. I'm more excited about it than ever.

***

*except for the hour or so where they all gathered around the island in the kitchen and shouted about politics, and instead of joining in I crocheted in the family room and listened to James ask my grandfather about the Navy.