Sunday, Feb. 09, 2003
Helping a friend move, posted at 12:46 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com I had another good day yesterday, helping Rob move out of my house and into his new apartment. Rob is the 6-year boyfriend of Michelle, a Spanish teacher at my school whom I immediately became good friends with, and he moved down to Baltimore this year and became my roommate. Unsurprisingly, he ended up spending almost all his time at Michelle's, which is a bummer but sort of expected. I still got to hang out quite a bit with them, and became good friends with Rob in the process.Yesterday, he asked me to help him move out. I expected that it would have been just a couple of hours, but ended up being a complete day task. Still, it was well worth it. Rob is a good friend and it makes me feel good to help friends out.
We also had a lot of laughs. For example, we lost a mattress on the expressway in the dark and didn't know it. By the time we dropped off the other stuff and went back to the highway to look for it, we had envisioned all of these horrible visions in our head about the mattress causing a 50-car crash. Instead it had fallen off and was standing almost straight up against a guardrail. Unbelievable. The mattress wasn't even ruined. We laughed from the relief of it all.
At one point towards the end of the night, Rob told me, "Epiphany, you are just a very giving person, not just today but all the time. I want to thank you, and I'm not just blowing smoke up your ass, either." It was one of the nicest things anyone's ever said to me. He took me out to eat and we called it a night. What a long, satisfying day.
The moment that I will most remember of our tenure as roommates: One day in the fall, I'm stressed out from the difficulties of a new school year and the exhaustion has been setting in. Rob, a first year middle school music teacher (ugh... can you imagine?), is even more stressed out and bummed out. We're sitting around, sharing our ennui and our dissolution, when suddently he hops up, grabs my acoustic guitar that I cannot play, and starts singing Bruce Springsteen's "Glory Days." He gets this huge grin on his face, playing it with all his energy - a damn good version, too, interrupted only by asking me for the next line a couple of times. At the end, just like in the original song, he turns back to his imaginary band and says, "Alright boys, keep on rocking now, alright now, let's keep it goin!". It was a gleeful moment, one that cheered me up incessantly and became the highlight of what had been a pretty crummy week until that point. Our ten hours together yesterday working might have been something that could cement ourselves to being lifelong friends.