third time's the charm

It was the best of times, it was (not) the worst of times…George has requested that all blogs this weekend start with a literary reference. Molly here with the latest blog entry from the b-b-b-b-b-b-b-best weekend ever.

George rolled into Atlanta around 8:30 p.m. last night. When recounting his trip for me, we started to compare it to his other visits to this fair city. Like me, George spent a fair number of family vacations in Atlanta, enjoying one of the best hotels in the world. But, he has made two solo trips to visit me, each of which occurred while I was in college.

To distract ourselves from the heat, we started to recount these odysseys. The first trip was easy to remember. I was but a freshman in college, and George an impressionable high school junior. George remembers this trip as one of the first times he ever went to a bar, being that he was only 16. If you can do the math, I was only 18, so really neither of us should have been in the bar, but it was one of those glorious college bars where nothing couldn’t have been fixed by slipping the waiter ten dollars. So with that Alexander Hamilton, George’s freedom was bought. Although I’d like to point out that I had to pay for this, because George conveniently “forgot” his wallet in my dorm room, despite the fact that it had a little parental spending money for the both of us inside.

We also reminisced about a Hardee’s trip I made him make because I had a coupons for free sandwiches (as you’ll recall, George had a habit of “forgetting” his wallet). George also remembers hanging out with the big kids, going to Blockbuster and watching movies. Man, college is exciting! I’d like to think that this was the most formative experience in George’s life, and since he didn’t say anything when I read this sentence out loud, I’m going to conclude that it was.

George just said, “I wasn’t even listening to you. I was watching ‘Jackie Brown’ and looking at your coffee table book of historic Seattle.”

I’m not reading this sentence out loud to him, but I think what he was really trying to say there, was, “yes, Molly, it was the most formative experience in my life. Thanks for being such a great big sister.”

The second trip to Atlanta was apparently not as memorable for him, as we had a lot of problems trying to reconstruct exactly what went down. Here’s what we remembered at first: I was in a park and had to leave to meet George, who distinctly remembers the parking structure he parked in. We knew at some point we ate a bar called Brick Store, where George yet again got to feel the vivacious high of drinking underage in public. But other than that, we couldn’t remember anything. Why was he there? How long was he there? Was there someone with him? What was going on here?

Based on George’s description of the parking structure, I was able to ascertain that this must have occurred my senior year. He remembered that I was reading in the park with people when I had to leave, which made me have a flashback which led me to believe that it was first semester as opposed to second semester. But why was George in Atlanta in the fall when he should have been up at Virginia Tech, learning? We still weren’t sure. We pondered it the entire walk to the bar. We pondered it as we ordered some delicious burgers and some refreshing beverages. We thought about calling our mother, which we were going to have to do soon, before she went to bed. We wondered if this mystery would occupy the whole weekend. Then, George, between bites of burger, said, “maybe we were switching out cars.” And immediately, I knew he was right.

I don’t know what other people do when their cars on the fritz, or how other families handle such a crisis. But in my family, you take your dad’s car, even if you’re going 3 ½ hours away. But make no mistake, he wants that car back. He will orchestrate elaborate driving schemes to meet his goals. So best we can figure, my car must have been in the shop, so I drove my dad’s car back to school to Atlanta. When the car was fixed, George was tapped to drive my Avalon back to Atlanta. Lunch most likely was paid for by Dad, as a way to bribe George to drive seven hours round-trip to acquire the car. Like I said, I don’t know if other families work this way, but as soon as George brought up that a car swap might have been involved, I knew he was right. That would explain why George had no memory of spending the night, or stopping off in Atlanta in the midst of a road trip…he was there specifically to switch cars.

So that is one of the reasons why you will see us blog this weekend obsessively. So that the next time we meet up, we don’t have to waste a lot of time trying to remember what happened. We will just read this blog. I hope this blog never gets deleted!!!!!!!!!!