Lucky Lucky Lucky

Last night, I brought home the second can of lucky green paint (more specifically Sherwin Williams' Duration Home in "Envy"). I was going to finish the paneling in the playroom, which, by the way, is going to rock. I opened the door to the back seat of the car we call Green Bus (we're into verdant) and pulled out the bag of paint and painter's tape. Before I knew what kind of equilibrium in the galaxy had been interrupted, I looked down to see lucky green paint forming a small kiddie pool on our brick driveway.

I gasped and used some colorful language. The color of the language was probably green. My immediate thought was, "The neighbors will think I did this on purpose. They will think I wanted to see what my driveway looked like as the green brick road."

I rushed inside to drop off my bag and lifted up a small, rushed prayer that hub wasn't home yet because if he had been home, I would have needed to explain how I just spilled green paint on the driveway, and that would involve more gasping and colorful language.

I rushed back outside and turned on the hose. As I pointed the hose toward the paint, I watched the pool of lucky green turn into an even bigger, wilder pool of green. I realized that our driveway did not slant downwards toward the road as one might expect. The green pooled into the tiny crevices between the bricks, splashed up on the neighbor's car. The green seeped behind the row of trash cans on the left, it formed a gully close to the flower beds on the right.

The sun was beginning to set and I could barely see what I was doing. I started to flush some of the green into the street, but the more I flushed in one direction, the more green paint would trickle out in other directions.

Our driveway looked like the river in Chicago on St. Patty's Day.

The Vietnamese neighbors drove by and looked inquisitively at this small leprechaun of a woman, wearing all green, standing next to her green car, holding a green hose to her brick driveway at 8p.m. at night, causing pools of bright green to flush into the street.

Another crazy Irish person moves into the neighborhood, just what we need, they thought.

Just Don't Ask Me What the Encore Was, Because It Was Past My Bedtime

Be prepared to be absolutely electrified by this bloke. He opened last night's set with "Under the Influence" and every white kid from BU who had crawled out of her 3rd floor brownstone oven was swaying and singing and falling in lust with James Morrison. J-Mor rocks the stage like a kid with a rockabillly twitch, kicking up his white Cons with his skinny legs in skinny Euro jeans. The band covered "The Seed" by the Roots which was excellent. They moved through the set list very smoothly, with minimal shout-outs to the audience, but J-Mor seemed very sincere when he shouted, "All right! Boston! You're awesome! You're really full-on, tonight, eh?" I expect more good stuff from this band of Brits. Maybe someday I'll see them when I have not purchased tickets before I become pregnant and hit a brick wall of fatigue by 11p.m. because I am 3 months pregnant by the time I see them live. Oosh.

Closer to Fine

Whenever I listen to the Indigo Girls, I am transported to a time in my life in which my mind and heart were changing so rapidly, I am not sure that such speeds of transformation are safe for anyone beyond the age of 18. I was away from home for the first time in any permanent way, missing my friends from home like something fierce, and learning to question everything. It is important for me to note, too, that this was a time in my life when my husband did not know me. He is only acquainted with my Indigo Girls incarnation, whom I believe was probably preparing her mind and heart to meet him. Soon.

My friend Sopia was probably the first bona fide IG fan I knew, especially since she had older sisters who probably bought IG albums when they were first released, not just the 1200 curfews - was it 1,200 curfews or many midnight curfews? - and her sisters probably put them on mix tapes for one another, which I still did when I was 18, but only because I was not hip to the newest in CD burning devices.

I had heard the song "Galileo" several times, especially when I was looking at colleges and the inevitable pixie-looking soprano in every college a capella troupe was bound to cover "Galileo." There's always something that grips me about that chorus,

How long 'til my soul gets it right?

It's the rhetorical question of every young woman, I'm sure, who falls for the right guy at the wrong time, or someone very wrong who's conveniently right there when she wants someone. During my first year of college, I was pining after someone whom I was sure walked on water. And after tredding water in one place around this quasi Second Coming, I was bound to tire and sink, and that year I sank to a new depth in my life and could not pull my own anchor for anything. Over and over, in my solace of sleeplessness and eating Saltines for days, I listened to 1200 Curfews. Something about the interplay between Amy Ray and Emily Saliers on that album which is recorded live - their wise narrative, their learned guitar strummings - was so comforting to me.

I was in a play that year with a brilliant senior actress, Shauna, who said she loved "Least Complicated." We bonded over the lyrics as we applied our stage make-up,

The hardest to learn is the least complicated.

It was a long time after my freshman year of college before I could listen to 1200 Curfews without being consumed by memories of that year. Occasionally, I will hear an IG song and it will try to prick my 18 year-old heart, but my heart is not a college girl's heart anymore. It doesn't believe that people walk on water, and it doesn't really have time to lose sleep or even to listen to a whole double decker album. But it's still trying to get it right, and sometimes that involves mastering the least complicated.