florida, part one

Sad but true: my mother can party circles around me.

Here I am halfway into my weekend with her, a visit which feels more like a sorority overnight than a relaxing getaway in the tropical land of the elderly, and I am ready to bury my head under the covers and not reemerge until spring.

I landed Thursday at 8pm and we went straight to Nick's. (Nick's Tomato Pie in Jupiter is the best Italian in all of Florida). We had a little dinner at the bar, then proceeded to close the joint (if only because Nick himself kept buying us drinks and, well, I haven't been to that place without closing it since I was eleven years old and it was a favorite stop on the way home from picking my father up from the airport).

Friday we dwindled away in massages and shoe shopping because it was too cool for the pool. We had stone crabs and mustard sauce for dinner (I made a salad and steamed some asparagus and my mother decided that was sufficient to merit the title "domestic goddess"), then gussied ourselves up and tromped through the hole in the fence to The Bistro next door, which--you guessed it--we proceeded to close.

All in all it was a lovely night. I drank far too much Chardonnay, so of course I saddled myself with a headache of epic proportions, but the five hours we spent at the outdoor bar, by the ferns and the frog pond, were passed in genial conversation and bawdy innuendo. How we ended up at the neighbors' house petting ferrets and playing pool with the super cute bartender until three thirty, I'll never know, but I remain convinced of two things: 1. I'm no good at pool, and 2. I remain a total enigma to normal men.

I say the latter because the Bartender and I (names withheld to protect the innocent) spent the next hour on the frigid and sprinklered lawn of my mother's development, staring at the pool making small talk about the restaurant industry. And I either scared him away with all my references to books and baseball (he's not much of a reader and says he's never heard a woman talk that way about a sport) or I'm just not the kind of girl the All-American boy finds attractive. Fascinating perhaps, but not attractive. A sociological study, perhaps. (They should make a National Geographic special on nerdy girls, spare us the trouble...)

But it was good flirting practice, I suppose, even if I failed miserably.He did walk me to my door and kiss my cheek at the end of the night, which was very sweet.

Now it's nearly three and I'm still trying to recover, to muster up the pluck to face the rest of the day, which soon will turn to evening. What tonight has in store, I can only guess. In the meantime, this is why the gods sent us Starbucks.