“Hello, Goodbye”
Shortly after I got back from New York, Lori and I had a discussion. Basically she told me that we weren’t in a relationship even though we never actually discussed it. I had believed that for a while and thought we had discussed it. She informed me that she had gone on a date with Chris while I was away. I was a little annoyed that she did this while I was away because it felt like she was going behind my back. Not that she was, but still. I know she was doing it to spare my feelings. If it didn’t work out, no harm, no foul. I was more annoyed that she felt she couldn’t tell me. More importantly, though, I was happy. I knew, to spare her feelings, that she would need to find someone first. Their first date did go well, so she felt obligated to let me know. They were taking their relationship slow at first for the first few months…
A few weeks after Christmas, our male guinea pig, Nala, got sick It was relatively quick. We saw him sick that morning and by early afternoon he had died. Both Lori and I felt so guilty. Each of us wondering if we could have done anything to prevent it. She thought maybe she gave him bad vegetables or maybe I didn’t clean the cage often enough. We didn’t know and felt horrible. We spent the next day or so talking about how great he was. He was not shy and loved attention. I had joked back in October that he wanted to be a fire engine for Halloween so everyone would notice him and had recalled that story.
Two days later, my friend Dan was going to be in town on business. Lori and I thought it would be good to get out and be social, The day he flew in happened to be his birthday, so we thought of taking him out to a new Mongolian BBQ that had just opened up. The place wasn’t that busy so our waitress was a lot more chatty with us than the average server. She was also rather strange. She told us she was going to school to become a homicide photographer. We mentioned it was Dan’s birthday and she said she would get the owner of the restaurant to sing happy birthday to him in Chinese. We thought that would be so awesome until it turned out she just sang ‘Happy Birthday’ in English with a thick Chinese accent. It was still rather funny… I invited the weird waitress to join us after she got off to join us at a bar we were going to in Boulder afterwards, but Lori and Dan got mad at me because she might have taken me up on the offer and she was just too weird. After pondering it, she decided she wouldn’t be able to so we drove up to Boulder where Dan was going to be staying and went out for drinks. Dan loved debating politics and such with me so we did. Lori was only vaguely interested, but politely listened. Anyway, he was bringing up this book he was reading about mass brain washing, mass mind control and how mob mentality worked. I don’t know if I was buying all of it, but as he was telling us how terrorists are convinced to blow themselves up, by the time their leaders are done with them you could convince them of anything. “By the time these young people are through with their training you can convince them of anything. You can tell them ‘Hey, you are a fire engine’ and they would believe it.”
Lori and I were in shock that Dan just said that. “What did you just say?” I asked. He repeated himself. I asked him why he used that example and he said that he didn’t know, he just used anything. Lori and I just looked at each other and smiled. We fully believed that our little guinea pig just channeled himself through my longtime friend to let us know it was okay. We didn’t dare tell Dan that he was possessed by our dead guinea pig at the time.
As we were leaving that night he told me to give Erin a call. Her and her long time boyfriend, Vic, had broken up. He had met a girl at work and it had become apparent that he became smitten with this girl, even in large social gatherings where everyone around felt uncomfortable. Finally, Erin asked him point blank if he liked the girl and he said he did. After that, she had locked herself in Dan and his wife, Casey’s guest room for a few weeks feeling really depressed. I hated thinking of her that way. I called her right away.
Years later, I brought the guinea pig thing up to Dan. He said he used that example because it was in a movie he had just seen, but I had seen and watched that movie since and there was no such quote.