Playing hooky
I'd had tickets to a Sox game back in April, but it got rained out. Rescheduling a ballgame scheduled for a rainy April day to a Friday afternoon in August is trading up, so to speak.

Unfortunately, it turned out that Kate couldn't get off work, so I wound up going with Amy. She's had a bit of a rough last couple of weeks; she thinks that as much as Sam says otherwise, the idea that Amy might have been one of the people who held her body hostage seems to be making her very nervous.

(Boy, my life is bizarre. I have no idea how to describe that.)

It was a fun game, and we had pretty good seats. Well, not seats, per se; we were in the standing room section of the right field picnic area. It's a great view, although some of the neighbors left a bit to be desired - it seemed to take a while for the kids apparently there for a birthday party to take an interest in the actual game, as opposed to throwing peanuts at one another.

There were also the usual folks who seemed kind of lubricated for a one o'clock start, and disappeared when the beer got cut off in the seventh. Amy stirred the ice in her soda as they walked off, wondering if she had been a drinker in her previous life. She didn't have any particular desire to do so right now, but how much of that was Amy's body and how much was some attitude left over from her previous life? And of course, the past year or so couldn't be forgotten - the Sanadas don't drink much, and getting pretty sick at some party had turned her off to it some as well.

So, I said, not having any more flashes of memory?

Not really. She saw her therapist earlier in the week, and told her about blurting Carter's name out, and that got her rewarded with a bunch of memory exercises that didn't seem to be doing much good. She seemed encouraged, though - ever since we'd found out that her amnesia was due to a physical trauma, they'd been worried that the memory was simply impossible to recover, like paper files that had been burned rather than misfiled. Amy's still worried that that might be the case - after all, there's no reason why it has to be all or nothing; some might be gone and some might just be missing.

Anyway, the Sox won, and we went our separate ways after.

I'll write more tomorrow - I've got tickets for tonight's game, as well, and this time Kate can make it.

-Marti

Labels: Amy, Kate, memories, Red Sox, therapy

- posted 5:38 PM - (0) comments - (archive use only)

 
But what does it mean?
Some people would ascribe my jumpiness at work yesterday to knowing something big was going to happen, but that's bull. Omens are connections we make after the fact in most cases; in others its the willful ignorance that you've been antsy before and nothing important happened. The reality is that I had had a new job shoved to the top of my to-do queue with the actual doing being slowed down by the person who requested it calling every fifteen minutes to see how I was doing. He'd probably be annoyed if he knew that I already wasn't fully concentrating because I was refreshing RedSox.com in another window to see if they had made a trade.

It did get done, in the end, but it took all day and then some, so I had to catch the 6:00 bus out of Waltham instead of the 5:30, and though it seems like an hour should be enough time to get from there to Coolidge Corner, it's not, so I had a cranky Kate waiting for me at the theater when I showed up fifteen minutes late for the seven o'clock show of Rescue Dawn.

"Sorry, Kate, I had--"

"Werner Herzog in the jungle."

"The guy needed it for a presentation--"

"WERNER HERZOG IN THE JUNGLE!"

"Tomorrow night, I promise. I'll skip the comic shop."

That mollified her a bit. After all, it's not actually important that I get the new comics the day they come out; it's just a habit thing. I'm only half-kidding when I say that everyone should cultivate a few habits like that, since they make great bargaining chips, at least in minor situations like this.

Anyway, she was satisfied, so we went across the street to J.P. Lick's to have some ice cream, where we bumped into Sam and Amy... Who had just seen Rescue Dawn and were raving about it. Amy asked if the Sox had done anything cool, and I mentioned Eric Gagne. That led to a long conversation about whether or not they should have given up Gabbard, whether the minor league outfielder they sent along was more valuable than Wily Mo Pena (whom they hadn't been able to trade), and so on. Not your typical girl talk, I guess, although this is Boston - the Red Sox are are everybody's talk.

The exact details of the conversation aren't that important - Sam said she was sick of seeing "Whiffy Mo" strike out, if you're curious. It was the way Amy answered: "C'mon, Carter, at least strikeouts aren't double plays."

The whole table fell silent, and Amy looked at us like we were nuts. "Well, they aren't. Back me up on this, Marti."

At that moment, I had completely forgotten what the point he'd made seconds before was. Amy looked at me like I'd lost my mind when I said nothing.

Sam was the first one able to talk. "Yeah, right, double plays, whatever. Who cares? You just called me Carter!"

It took a second for this to register with Amy, but then the enormity of it hit her. Sure, she knew that my ex-boyfriend had been switched with Sam at one point, but that was just knowledge. For her to actually use Carter's name... That had to come from experience.

I immediately whipped out my cell phone to try and talk to him (what can I say; I never purge my contact list of potentially useful names), but he wasn't answering him. I promised Amy that I'd pick his brain at the office today - even if we don't work at the same location, the phone systems are connected.

We're all a little excited - there's little more frustrating than having a mystery on your hands and not being able to find any clues whatsoever. Of course, I'd be lying if I said we weren't also a little scared, Amy in particular. She doesn't talk about it much, but ever since she learned that she really had been someone else, she's always been a little nervous about the person she'd been before - what if that someone wasn't a good person?

As much as she hates not having a past, she's not quite sure she likes bits of one breaking through to who she is now.

-Marti

Labels: Amy, Kate, memories, movies, Sam

- posted 8:55 AM - (1) comments - (archive use only)