July 4

For once I actually had July 4 off work. That only happens every few years, so I decided to make the most of it and head to Saltillo to take part in the annual grilled-meat-and-pyrotechnics-a-thon. A fun twist this year is that I somehow convinced the manfriend that he should get in on that shit and come with me. So we took off as early as we could coax ourselves to Sunday (think 2 p.m.), armed with a bag of margarita fixins and a big bowl of chicken salad I had made.

I haven’t taken a boy home to meet the family in … a long time. So naturally everyone acted like the zoo was getting a new animal and everyone wanted a chance to come gawk at it. Within seconds of arriving, we had a margarita in our hands and moonshine had been shoved in our faces. My dad had teased me mercilessly leading up to Sunday, seeing as the manfriend is from Jersey and has been dubbed a full-on Yankee. But everyone was on their best behavior (read: they were goofy as ever) and I was so unbelievably relieved and happy to just sort of watch as everyone got along really well. Even — especially! — through gun show-and-tell time!

Maybe I also felt a little happy because as soon as we got to the house, I started pawing through the medicine cabinet for some Tylenol to knock out my lingering headache (**coughhangovercough**), and since it was kind of hectic and everyone was talking at and around me and I was checking back to make sure the manfriend wasn’t being ambushed and it was just chaos, I accidentally popped THREE TYLENOL PMS instead of actual regular don’t-fall-asleep-instantly Tylenol. My nervous brain did not even register why the pills I was putting into my mouth were blue. As soon as I realized my mistake — made on an empty stomach, no less — I began thinking I should make myself puke, but my sister seemed to think I’d probably already absorbed the medicine. And she was right. Shit got real trippy then, and I set about occupying myself the rest of the evening so that I wouldn’t fall asleep. This involved a LOT of coffee and M&Ms. And a lot of sympathetic looks from the manfriend, who was probably worried that I would fall asleep and leave him to the wolves. It was not unlike being in a Nightmare on Elm Street movie. Whatever you do, do not close your eyes.

But I mostly kept it together. Well, I stayed awake. I was pretty unable to comprehend complex sentences (people would talk to me and it just seemed soooo faaast) but my emotions felt super squishy and nice. The fireworks were pretty awesome, especially this one set called Chicken on a Chain. Yes, I don’t know what the hell that means and even when I was on sleepy drugs, it didn’t make any damn sense. But they sure were pretty.

Monday I got up early thanks to phone calls from the manfriend, who was stationed downstairs to sleep while I was upstairs (my parents are at least consistent in their old fashionedness). He wanted a tour of Saltillo, which I gave him in all of ten minutes. Then we headed out to Savannah to go to Walmart. I told him all the ridiculous hometown stories I could muster. Yes, including the one about the local decapitation lore. I am a fucking charmer. We ate delicious and greasy ground beef-based meals at the Worley Bird Café (named for Savannah’s current most famous export) and came back to Saltillo for more time with the family. The manfriend is such an unbelievably good sport, even when he was informed that because I have referred to him as “manfriend,” everyone else has started calling him “Manfred.”

He’s a catch, I tell you.