i got to meet Mad this weekend.

it’s an odd thing, to meet someone whose internal monologue you’ve been reading for a year, someone whose smarts and wit and unflinchingness won your respect a long ways back, someone whose life you know more about than you do most of your real-life friends. it is especially poignant, this first meet-up, when one of you is very newly “out” as pregnant and the other has very recently and traumatically miscarried a much-wanted pregnancy. it is particularly weird, if you are me, to be for the first time ever on the non-bereaved side of that equation, fearing treading on wounds you know well but are still not immune from bruising others with. so i sidled up to the hotel in the Saturday night snowstorm all a-twitter with excitement and trepidation, like a puzzled suitor. were we old friends? was it a first date? did the fact that she’s waaaaay more experienced in the ways of bloggy meet-ups make me a comparable bumbling virgin-type? would we trust each other, like each other in person as much as we do behind these pleasantly constructed versions of our best selves, with spellcheck?

um…yeh.

the play by play is probably irrelevant…the best evenings leave little to report but much to feed on. we fed on curry and chips and high ideas and low gossip and filled in the gaps left out of these online personas, or started…and she brought me a copy of the Tom Waits & Crystal Gayle album that i’ve been looking for for literally nineteen years…and i was humbled, and happy, and delighted just to be there in her company. and we were able to talk about some of the various elephants in the room and then we were just getting into the really good stuff, the scaffolding of ideas and what lives under a person’s skin when the truly awful cock-rock cover band started up and made me want to stab myself in the eardrums, so we kissed goodnight (chastely, Jen, i know you’ve got her heart) and made for home.

but not before we - in an act of shameful heterosexism which should have appalled our feminist sensibilities but was instead, erm, entertainingly ironic…maybe - set up a betrothal brunch between our offspring. M & Oscar…born for each other…with M’s sweet maturity of three and O’s youthful exuberance of 22 months, and the fact that their parents both belong to couples where the woman is the elder partner, and the fact that he willingly shared his blueberries with her (her favourite too! kismet!) and she was not only generous with her tube of funky sea critter toys but also quite bewitching with her shy but ready smiles, i think Mad & i should be procuring ourselves a nice, shared grandchild to blog about come about, oh, 2035.

i - i shit you not - frocked Oscar up in his best corduroy jacket for the occasion, and wee M was gorgeous in her red smocked dress and tights, and then, hapless creature that i am, i forgot to take the engagement photo.

so i leave you only with us future proud grandmas. she made my weekend. she’s way cool, and mad, indeed….and if any of you want to join us at the now-going-to-really-
happen-come-hell-or-sea-water Maritime BlogHer 2008, leave a comment. we’re a very cheap conference, and friendly too. ;)

MadBon
(and yeh, i really do wear the hat all winter. i told you, but i know nobody believed me. just to try to keep poor Hat from getting overexposed, i even left it home for Sunday’s brunch, but then forgot to take pictures at all. sigh.)