Mark decided that we should stay up until midnight every night so that we wouldn't be going to bed at 6 PM when we returned to the West Coast. The only problem was that sleeping until 8 AM felt both slovenly (from an Eastern Time point of view) and masochistically early (from a 5 AM Pacific Time point of view). Getting up at 7 was a little worse, but required if one wasn't going to lose the morning.
Our routine developed into get up, perform our ablutions, drive to a coffee roasting cafe (located within an old bank), order coffee and tea, then drive to his mother's house.
Monday morning was a continuation of the previous day's party, only more laid-back and with fewer people. Mark's mom is recovering from various medial issues related to being in her eighties; she was doing much worse back in May, and looked pretty good in August.
We gathered in the TV room and listened to stories from her childhood. She was a wild Catholic girl, and told us how she used to dress in a Catholic school uniform in the morning, throw jeans out of her bedroom window, head to a friend's house, change into the jeans, go to school, and then reverse the process going home so her parents wouldn't know she was wearing pants to school. She also used to tell ancient and maidenly aunts who hosted her over summers that she was going to go play basketball with friends when she was really going to Coney Island to kiss boys. There were other stories of 1940's and 1950's social life: young boys being shipped off to pre-seminary school; wearing fancy hats and gloves to watch polo games; and fussy aunts who literally would run a finger over one's furniture and inspect the digit for any resulting dirt.
It was all interesting -- and I consumed at least two clever little eight ounce cans of Pepsi -- but I was overcome with the desire to nap, and passed out, before 11:30 AM, masked up, on a couch in another room.
Monday evening, there was another party, this time with a game of bocce. Mark's out-of-town siblings had left, but the Virginia Dwyers were still around. I pulled out my camera to take some more photos of folks. One team gathered together, and to get good photos of them, I had to climb up to the tallest part of the yard.
Mark saw me in the distance, but -- because of the way my hair was falling over my shoulders, and because my COVID mask covered my face, and because I was crouching down -- he didn't recognize who I was or what I was.
So he came over to take a photo of the troll hiding in the vegetation, realized as he got closer that it was me, and started laughing.
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