Pinching Myself

I am still pinching myself and the good fortune of getting to move back home. There is a part of me that feels like I have never been away and then the other part that remembers how homesick I felt for two and a half years. I keep waiting to wake up in my old apartment but thankfully I wake up each morning, on Central time, in Nashville and to everything that made my daily routine just so good. I took it for granted back then and now I just smile and realize that even if I do have a bad day, I am where I want to be.

This past week has been a blur, a lot of learning new things as well as spending time with old friends. I was notorious for invoking the no going out on a school night for many years. In fact, Bear, called me out on this a couple of months before I moved to Chattanooga. He called it via text, exactly what I was doing, so I knew that when I moved back home I had to change this.

I don’t want to go out every night, but it does help you realize that you have friends and they do care about you. So I spent some time with the Queen on Tuesday evening and as I was driving back home I was pinching myself because, hey! I am driving back to my apartment in a city that I adore and I don’t have to rush back to Chattanooga.

Thursday evening rolls around and I had a hankering for wings, so I changed from my work clothes to some jeans and a t-shirt and headed back out. Once I got to BW3 and placed my order I texted Bear. When he got there he asked what I was doing in town and I laughed and said, well I moved back. Apparently I am not in his news feed for FB. We laughed, made fun of each other and talked about football, because really, that is one of the things we have always talked about.

He then mentioned a bar that he sometimes goes to and said, come on, are you going home or do you want to go there. The old me would have said I was going home and I would have been a good girl. In an effort to force myself out a bit more I said sure. And off we went.

We watched some of the Little League World series (Go Goodlettsville!) and I shared just how stupid I am when it comes to baseball. We talked football, best places to watch the games and his fantasy NASCAR teams. Um, yeah, I mocked him for that. Then the bartender comes up giggling and asks if I watched Sex and the City. Turns out the owner is friends with John Corbett who played Aidan.

Tangent: People, I spent six years, every Sunday night with a group of my girlfriends eating, drinking and watching this show. To say I am a fan is a slight understatement. We even gathered a group of girls together to see the first movie in the theater and smuggled in cheap champagne in cans to celebrate.

Okay, now where was I? Oh yes, so he may or may not come by. Bear keeps asking who this guy is and I go through a list of what I can remember him from and he still doesn’t know who he is but like I care. This is about me! Mr. Corbett comes in and since the bar has maybe seven people total there, it isn’t really hard to look across and see him.

Oh! One more tangent: There is an unspoken code in Nashville, we don’t bother the stars that we bump into, it is probably more about we all have lives and really, you see Tim McGraw once, you have seen him a hundred times. No biggie. But to the dismay of my dad, I don’t bother them when they are out, I don’t take pictures or anything else. The other part is I am oblivious most of the time until I have left and then I smack my forehead and say, oh wow, that was such and such.

But Thursday night I broke the code. Minus the two bartenders that night, I was the only female so Mr. Corbett is having a nice evening just hanging out chatting with his friends. As we are getting ready to leave, Bear runs to the restroom and I do the complete dork/goober thing by stopping to ask for a picture. I felt awful about bothering him but there was a small part of me that just wanted to have one picture with him.

You guys, he was so nice. We took several pictures because the one thing the iPhone is crappy about is the camera when it comes to strange lighting. Besides the fact that he was freakishly tall, I was impressed in how kind and willing he was to stop, chat and take time out of his downtime for a complete stranger.

And Bear now has a picture with him and still couldn’t tell you who he is, which is about par for the course. We left, he mocked me and then we agreed that football is going to be a priority for this fall.

Yesterday he made the fatal mistake of mentioning that he was cooking jambalaya. I quickly responded with a “do you deliver?” With the promise of a decent sized tv and the Titans on I got a dinner prepped in my kitchen by Bear. Dude, thanks, it was so good but you really need to become more open to shrimp because the whole shrimp and grits thing is to die for, I promise.

And I didn’t go to sleep until way past midnight; this girl doesn’t stay up late often anymore and the bad part has to be that I still wake up fairly early. After errands, a power nap and trying to get things together for a business trip, I hit the pool. I also got to hang with Bear and his very cute and sassy daughter. Lord help him when she is a teenager, she is going to put him through the paces. I will be there to laugh at him.

But even without a decent nap, I am reminded just how lucky I am. I have a group of friends that are like family to me, a crazy and sometimes very needy cat and a job that I enjoy. Not bad for a girl who broke down earlier this summer, crying about being homesick. And even if I do lose some sleep from time to time, spending time with my friends on a school night is worth it.

So I will continue to pinch myself and smile at lucky I am. I will also know that when the Steelers play the Titans I have one more person I can harass with glee. That might be a fair warning for Nashville, things could get ugly this fall because you have two football junkies that happen to enjoy spending large amounts of Sunday sitting on a bar stool to take advantage of Sunday Ticket.