  Memorial Day weekend will always be a fishing weekend, as little as I go fishing anymore. My husband always made the yearly pilgrimage to the river with his muddy cooler and his Busch Lite. The tradition stuck fast with me, although I spent this weekend at home. Two years ago: Twenty-one in overalls, sleeping face down in the grass.
The river was swollen from lots of rain. Oil cans and coolers and tires and whole dead trees floated idly by while we fished. We caught nothing. I had a burning crush on my husband's friend who was with us. He was a mean man, but he was tall and he had dark brown eyes. I have been a victim of dark brown eyes. I didn't dare breathe a word of my affection, but he found his way into my dreams. I showed my adoration by allowing him to sit shotgun while I inhabited the back seat with the squalid sack of dead minnows we brought along for bait. I slept uncovered in the dirt, with spiders leaning over me on stalks of grass and ashes blowing from the fire.
I slept on the ground because I am a country girl of good peasant stock, because I've been camping all my life. I thought it proved my worth to the men, who were accustomed to finicky permed kind of girls. But now I realize that it did nothing but make me look like a submissive dog, asleep at her master's feet. My friend came to see me this weekend, a friend I dated briefly after the divorce. We went to Lonestar Lake and drank whiskey on the dock. We had a nice talk, and we'd just passed the formalities and started to get down to the real things, then a hoard of teenagers roared up in a truck and ran screaming into the water.
Then a handful of overweight fisherman came and sat right beside us. They were cool, but we wanted to be alone, so we went back to my place and played cards. I won, so he drank. He's kind of artistocratic and flimsy, allergic to everything and prone to seizures--definitely not of the same stout composition as me. He threw up from the whiskey and passed out on my couch. He's a good guy, and I think we will be friends for a long time.
Without the civilizing influence of my roommate, I have devolved into a bachelor-like existence. Dishes in the sink, art projects littering the floor, laundry hanging from every doorknob. As much as I dig living alone, I miss her. It's like she's my husband or something. She's in Africa now, sleeping in missionary quarters. She will soon be swabbing AIDS patients and building chicken coops with her church group. No memorial for Memorial Day. Just housework and cigarettes and errands. Last night I slept in the arms of my man, who returned from Texas at midnight. We stayed up until we heard the morning birds calling in the trees. I dreamed B grade horror movie kind of dreams, running from zombies and digging deep in the ruined earth. And now I'm at work--Tired! I am in love. Here is something I have been meaning to write for awhile just to remind myself: It is possible that I take too much for granted, I am too self assured, and I am eager to trust what I hear when I hear what I want to.
I might be the one to fall. While I am in the self-administered advice-giving mode: I decided to give drinking a rest as of Sunday morning. I consider myself a social drinker, nothing more. But lord did I crave a drink yesterday. I need to clean up my act. I'll be getting old fast if I keep hurting myself like I do. 
