8. woman of the world
One time I was having dinner at my friend’s house in LA. She’s the one I stayed with for a week when I first got here. She let me stay in her guest house. It was so nice of her and so sweet of a home. Her husband runs a social media company he started when they first started dating 11 or so years ago. Our mutual friend, my old coworker and producer who ran the print production portion of the million dollar brand i worked for, that our mutual friend, the one who’s guest house i stayed in, worked on as the producer to the photographer i got the marketing head of the million dollar brand i worked on to continuously hire under the persuasion that we were to build a series of photo collections that could live in their library asset for years to come. It was my idea but I let my boss pick the photographer. As his inferior, I did the convincing and converting and in turn, he got to work with the guy he wanted.
Anyway, that night it was my friend’s family, the producer and my friend’s father gathered around the dinner table! And if there’s one thing you out to know about me... it’s that I love families. It’s just so fun getting to know all the dynamics at play amongst people who share the same blood! I feel like my entire life leading up to college and sprinklings of there after, was just hopping from my family to another family. 60% of the time it was my own but 40% I was hopping around other families. Checking them out, seeing what life was like at other ends of the world and in different homes of the same communities. I was like a nucleus constantly finding cells to have swarm around me.
I arrived quite late that evening. LA traffic is really so hard to understand. Try as I might, I had only been in LA for 2 months and there was a lot to navigate with the road systems here. So when I walked through the door my seat had already been decided.
I knew Henry would be sat at the head of the table because that’s where he sits when the family eats at home. Mom to his right, Dad to his left, Henry at the center of orbit. I thought me and Henry really got along when I lived with them for a week. We only crossed paths a few times but I felt a strong bond each time. Less of a bond with his sister, June though I still love that little girl like she’s my own she’s too sweet for me. Henry had a flair for the dramatics and I saw myself in the way he strutted around his family, commanding the room with a simple hand gesture.
When I sat down at the table in between Mr. Dad, Henry’s mother’s father and Henry’s dad, Henry shouted at the table
“Who is THAT!?”
Our mutual friend, the producer sarcastically said “wow, I thought you two were good friends.” My friend, Henry’s mother, volcanoed a laugh as Henry’s dad and Mr. Dad giggled under their breaths. I was humiliated. I looked at Henry, slanted my head and furrowed my brows and said “yeah I thought that too.”
And then turned my attention to Mr. Dad. I was going to need a new friend at the table and I liked Mr. Dad’s sense of style.
He asked me what I was up to before I got to ask him anything. We got to talking. I noticed he had an accent so I asked him where he was born. I always phrase it like that because everytime people ask my mom where she’s from she tells them New York instead of Italy even though she was born in Sicily. She skips part of her story and omits a part of where she came from mostly because these people are usually asking the crowd a quick question and she doesn’t have time to explain or because she’s not looking to explain herself to whoever asked the question.
Since I was interested in his accent specifically, I asked him where he was born. This made him pause for reflection. As he hestitated to respond, he made the “hmm” noise like he had to really think about it. I laughed so unexpectedly at his reaction to my simple question, I spit out a little piece of the short rib I was eating that my friend’s chef who comes over the house sometimes to make food for the family, made for us to enjoy. It was so good. I felt bad I made a mockery of it by spitting it out accidentally but I was still smiling as I picked up the sliver of meat off the hand that was holding my fork and put it on my napkin and said “sorry, it’s just that you hesitated” through my own giggles.
He said, “Well, I was born in England,
but I like to consider myself a man of the world...”
And I said, “you know what, me too!”