Two weekend highlights

This was going to be a post trying to work through some reflections I have brewing about the loneliness I wrote about last time...but I think I'll save that for another time. Because there were two great things about my weekend:

Remember how I posted, last month, about my mourning the very close friendship I had made in last year's Uni City? About how it seemed to be over with Faux-Girlfriend? Well, I won't bore you with the details - they have to do with a major problem I was having with my ISP, which was screwing with my emails to and from a few people...and what I didn't realize was that she was included in that small group. We literally weren't getting each other's messages. Anyway, we are so back on - have talked a couple of times, and are emailing. And it feels so good - such deep relief.

Faux-Girlfriend was in Home City for the weekend, and she and her boyfriend stayed overnight with me last night. As if that weren't enough - and it really was special, it really felt like an emotional reunion - they had stocked up on fine food. They'd bought five artisanal Quebec cheeses, and the best olives I've had in North America, and homemade caramelized onion flatbread, and sparkling wine, and Riesling, and handmade caramel/sea salt truffles . And we made that our dinner, and it was divine. Since one of the things Faux-Girlfriend and I share is a deep love of good food - and of drinking together - it was about the loveliest thing I'd done in months. And the cheese! Good lord, the cheese...

And then tonight, there was this: A CBC TV movie called Booky Makes Her Mark. When I was ten or eleven, I had an obsession with these Canadian young adult books by Bernice Thurman Hunter, about a character named Booky. I reread those books - especially With Love From Booky - more than any other. I'm not sure what it was about them that appealed so much - probably the depiction of everyday life in a historical period, the Great Depression..I continue to enjoy that. And the books were set in Home City - I think it was in part that I was able to map out Booky's life. Also, Booky wanted to be a writer, a fantasy that appealed deeply to the voracious reader - and writer - that I was in those days. It's funny - I recall that I was on to adult books in general, but I just could not get enough of that series...Many of the scenes in those books are really etched in my consciousness...

And yet, of course, I'd forgotten about them. So to have them made into this Sunday-night, classic-CBC, gritty-but-feelgood TV movie was just such a thrill! What a way to be reminded. Best of all, Megan Follows starred as Booky's mother. Megan Follows! Could Sunday night have gotten any better? Megan Follows, of course, played Anne of Green Gables in the two CBC miniseries of those LM Montgomery books - TV events with which I was similarly obsessed, in the same period as the Booky books.

Sigh. I even ate my dinner (which involved roasted sweet potatoes - yum!) in front of the TV, watching Booky and Megan. My mother never allowed me to eat in front of the TV. That's a policy that I agree with in spirit (imagine being a single mum, cooking dinner for your ungrateful kid and having her eat it slouching in front of the TV instead of talking to you). But I have to say that eating a meal while I watch TV still resonates with forbidden decadence.