dinner with becca and tyler
When I'm kind of bummed that I don't get to see someone I love very often, and I am perfectly capable of being a big part of changing that, then it's time to put up or shut up. I was pretty disappointed that Becca did not make it to Wallace when we were there, but that was an expectation of them driving 390 miles from home to see us. And we live all of 35 miles away from them! What effort have we made to see them since we last did, which was at their wedding reception party more than two years ago? Pretty much none.
It only occurred to me to take them out to dinner close to this holiday season when I thought about the amount of money I'd have to spend to mail both of their gifts to them, one of which was a set of two Seahawks/Bud Light beer glasses from Total Wine & More. Why not just give it to them in person?
Granted, the $83 I spent for dinner for four last night was still far more than I ever would have paid to mail the gifts (the other one being the key gift, the annual family calendar). But the personal value of getting to spend some quality time with them, even if it was for only about ninety minutes, far outweighs any extra monetary expense.
I totally intended to get at least one photo of all four of us at our table. Somehow, I just completely spaced it. I didn't even think of it again until Shobhit and I were already on the road home. Damn it! And now it may not be until April before we see each other again. I have totally committed to making sure we don't wait yet another two years, though. I decided last night that, if nothing else, we will do this dinner after Christmas every year, so I can deliver their gift in person. We also talked about having them come to Dad and Sherri's for Easter this year, and they effectively committed to it. Granted, Becca had also "committed" to coming to Wallace, so we'll see. Olympia may be a lot closer than the 390-mile distance from their place to Mom and Bill's in Wallace, but it's still a good 95 miles to Dad and Sherri's house. I guess the jobs they have regularly have them working on holidays, which sucks.
Sometimes I forget how truly blessed I am to work for PCC. I've worked here too long, and it becomes easy to take for granted. The people I work for don't just have morally upstanding values about things like how someone gets paid—it's hardly even a discussion because it's taken as a given. Becca, on the other hand, says she often has to work more than forty hours a week but her employer won't let their workers clock in for any more than forty hours when that happens. Isn't that illegal? She has apparently worked there for 16 months, assembling parts for airplanes for a company that presumably contracts with Boeing. Shobhit suggested she stick it out until she has a good solid two years of experience so she can then apply for a similar job at a better company, which is probably pretty solid advice.
Anyway, even when I had suggested to Becca that we meet for dinner, she clearly did not want to drive all the way down to Seattle. To be fair, that would have added a great deal to their drive each way, and apparently she gets up at 4 a.m. for work. We settled for meeting in the middle, sort of. I could swear to god she said they had driven 20 miles to the restaurant we met at in Everett, but that can't be right: they are back to living with his parents, and that address is 14 miles from the restaurant. Okay, maybe she just exaggerated. It's still a 23-minute drive from their place.
The drive was 38 minutes for us: 23 miles from home out of Seattle at the tail end of evening commute time. (Without traffic it would be closer to half an hour.) Traffic was precisely why I had suggested 7:00 as our commute time, that and Shobhit always prefers later for eating out anyway. I really wasn't sure how punctual they would be, and it turned out they were very much so: we timed our drive perfectly so we would arrive right at 7:00; they arrived almost ten minutes before that.
We met at a place called Avocado's Mexican Restaurant, which, conveniently for us, is on the south side of Everett. Apparently Tyler had eaten there once but Becca never had, but had heard good things about it. Shobhit and I are usually up for Mexican food, although Shobhit always has to ask about whether there is meat stock in their rice or beans. (Yes, chicken stock in their rice; no on the beans.) Shobhit and I had an order of spinach quesadilla and portabella mushroom fajitas, all of which was truly delicious.
Shobhit did have to get up and ask that they replace our basket of chips because he found a hair in them. I don't tend to give that much of a shit about that; hair is everywhere. But, on the plus side, the new basket had far fresher chips in them and they were warm, so that was nice. Also, no hair is still another plus, I'll admit.
It didn't even occur to me until this morning that, given that Becca mentioned last night she just turned 24 last month, she has aged two years since I last saw her, and therefore when she got married in 2017 she was 22. No wait, the wedding was in September so she was still 21! Jesus Christ.
She really opened up emotionally to us during our dinner conversation, which was both interesting and something I respected and appreciated. She told us about getting onto anxiety medications, which reduced her apparently near-daily anxiety attacks to roughly two a month. Holy shit. Twice a month would be way too many for me! But presumably a relief if they are daily. When I asked how long they have lived on this side of the mountains now, she said "about six years," and I about had a heart attack. Six years! I've seen her only a couple of times in that time, which is insane. I saw her at least four times in 2016, during both Christian and Braeden's final visits with me in Seattle—that was the last year any of them were able to visit—and also during an April visit Tristen had with them, as well as their one time to a holiday family gathering, for Easter that year. Prior to that, I saw her at Nikki and TJ's wedding in Spokane in 2014, and before that she visited me for an evening in 2013 when she was still in Job Corps, where she first met Tyler. I hung out with her during a bus layover in Seattle when she was on her way to visit Spokane.
We didn't talk a lot about her mom, but we did a little. Becca clearly has a different approach than Nikki, who told us last month that she hasn't had an actual conversation with Katina in two years. It sounds like Becca still keeps Katina at arm's length, but they do talk. Becca's perspective, as she told it to us anyway, was that she didn't want to run the risk of ever losing her mother without being on good terms with her. Because, she's her mother. I totally get that. And as little love as I have for Katina these days, I actually felt better about Becca's approach than I did Nikki's, which rather bummed me out. Of course, it's probably also relevant that Nikki is actually still living in the same city (Spokane), and that affords a lot more opportunity for their mom to do something that's, you know, "the last straw" kind of thing. The distance between myself and my own mother is a big reason we've managed to keep a civil relationship going as long as we have now.
I had Becca open the gifts as soon as we had ordered our dinner. Almost everyone we have those Seahawks glasses to were a lot more happy with them than I expected; for some reason I expected comparative indifference. Shobhit got a whole case of those things at Total Wine with his employee discount and they had been on sale already, so he got a super good deal on it. I spent a lot more on the calendars, which Becca really liked—but then, almost everyone does. The only calendar I can recall getting a kind of tepid response on average was my "Goofballs!" theme for 2013, which featured a lot of unflattering photos of family, which I thought were hilarious. This year's was "Waterfalls," though, half of them being from Danielle's and my visit to Niagara Falls, and you really can't go wrong with such a theme. I really feel like I long ago hit pay dirt with this calendars idea, which I've now done since 2007 (or Christmas 2006): I never have to wrack my brain to decide what gift to give everyone; they are universally appreciated (the one year I did the Grandma McQuilkin video instead, everyone was opening disappointed they didn't get a calendar); they have absolute utility so they aren't wasteful and everyone uses them. I even got an email from Uncle David the day after Christmas telling me how much he and Mary Ann loved theirs.
So, Becca and Tyler were both very appreciative. They were for the dinner as well: I'm not kidding, they thanked us no fewer than four times. It was almost excessive. It wasn't that big a deal to us; I rarely spend that much on dinner, but then I rarely pay for four, but I made it easy by budgeting for it. Learn how to budget, people! (I must begrudgingly admit here that it's Shobhit's crazy-making instance on such things that is the reason I now swear by it.) Budgeting is also now the single reason I'll be able to pay for most, if not all, of the costs of our trip to Australia without having to dip into my savings account: I set aside $2,000 from my cashed-out vacation time last year, and another $2,000 from my cashed out PTO that I got with last Friday's paycheck. And as much as I tried to tell him last year that this is what savings are for (he disagrees; he thinks it should only be for emergencies), I actually do feel better having done it this way, and I would have spent more money in the meantime that would otherwise be earmarked for that trip if I did it any other way.
So, in that vein, Shobhit suggested they "plan and budget" to allow for them to come to Olympia for Easter. (This presupposes Dad and Sherri will still host an Easter get-together, which is not a foregone conclusion, but probable.) Becca said to Tyler there at the table that he gets Christmas with his family, so she should get Easter with hers. And he agreed. So, we'll see. We also talked about how Shobhit and I go to the Tulip Festival almost every year and maybe this year we could all go together—it's a lot closer to where they live than to us, after all. I don’t know why we never thought of that idea already. Six years! It amazes me they've lived that close for that long.
They do have their own busy lives, of course, and I understand that as well. At one point Becca said she tries not to think about how little she gets to see us "because then I feel really shitty." Well, that's no necessary. No one's going out of their way to try to make her feel guilty. And as I said, I'm as much to blame for the lack of time spent together: what the fuck is stopping us from driving north, as we did last night? We should just start doing that more often. Becca is the only one of Christopher's kids who lives so close, and we should take advantage of it.
[posted 12:30 pm]