Eat, Drink, and Get Freaky

La Quinta: Spanish for "The room we send you to will have all the furniture upended in a pile in the middle of the room, so we'll give you another one, which will turn out not to have been cleaned, so we'll look and look and finally turn up a room with one king bed instead of two double beds as the reservation specified, which is a little awkward but hey, what happens in Huntsville stays in Huntsville, and oh by the way when we say free high-speed wireless internet in every room we actually just meant the lobby."

I'm told they also have over 11,000 words for beans.

So round one of the reunion was last night; and actually I had a pretty good time overall, though let me tell you what, it's absolutely freezing here in the northern wastelands of Alabama, and somebody didn't think to bring a jacket. The reunion was set up at our high school's football game, at one end of the field; but since it was cold and the team was losing miserably, it quickly got relocated to a bar called The Station.

You can smoke in restaurants and bars here. In fact, you don't really have a lot of choice in the matter: you might not be actually holding a cigarette, but you're damn well going to smoke, bucko. The Station was unspeakably smoky. I can wash my body, my hair, and my clothes, but I think I'm going to need a new purse. But that's okay, I didn't like this one very much anyway.

The turnout has been decent but not huge so far. It's a bit odd to see people you remember as kids looking like fortyish adults. "Oh my God, everyone's so OLD!" wailed one classmate. "Except of course me," she added.

And I got another surreal flashback moment during a conversation where one woman was talking about how hard it is for her to be the openly gay daughter of a fundamentalist Baptist mother. All her friends always thought her mom was cool, she said; but her mom just couldn't accept or understand her because she falls so far outside her mom's concept of right and wrong.

I remarked sympathetically that there are sometimes similar issues for my husband, since we're atheists and his parents are devout Catholics - his father is in fact a deacon. And while the woman I was talking to was listening and nodding, the chick next to her interrupted, with big eyes, and said in an outraged tone, "Wait a minute - did you say you're an atheist???"

It brought back vividly the way I felt in high school whenever the subject would come up. I remember one time standing at my locker, and two girls came up and tapped me on the shoulder and said, "We heard you don't believe in God!" I agreed, sighed inwardly, and turned back to my books, awaiting the usual lecture. But it didn't come, so, surprised, I turned back around to see the two girls staring at me, their eyes wide, backing away slowly.

Austin has spoiled me. The woman sitting on the other side of the gay daughter took up the discussion, telling me that she never passes judgement on anyone but that she knows you have to have Jesus to be saved, and pointed out that, minus the "thou shalt have no other god before me" and one or two others, I too live by the Ten Commandments. Yes! Atheists are not all about killing people and stealing stuff. Fancy that! "But those are the basic rules you have to have in place in order to have a functioning society," I said,

"That's right!" she said triumphantly.

"But those rules are universal to all religions and predate religion altogether," I went on.

"Exactly!"

I excused myself and went to sit by Pam.

Lesson learned: At tonight's function, listen to cheesy 80's music, laugh, eat, drink, get your freak on, and leave your mind behind, baby.