If you only knew how many tries it took to get this photo. And then when we finally did we were so excited/happy/inebriated that it was as if our team had won the world series.
On New Year’s Eve we all packed into Sly’s car and drove to our neighborhood fireworks warehouse. “Where are we going again, ” Sly asked and I looked at him, confused, because wasn’t it completely obvious? “You know, the fireworks place down the street — the one with the inflatable ape on top,” I answered. It wasn’t registering with Sly and then, after retelling a story about being pulled over by the cops that one time after leaving the store and accidentally driving into city limits, I realized that he wasn’t with us when that happened, that he had never actually been to THE fireworks store — the one we had been coming to forever, since (apparently) before Sly and I were together. Had it really been *that* long since I had been home for New Years Eve? The memory of that incident was still so fresh it didn’t even occur to me that Sly had not been there.