Scientist party

Last weekend the boy and dog and I were invited to a friend of a friend's going away party. His name was Wolf and hers was something French and they were warm and a little crazed, which is what I look for in my hosts. It is the curse of the going away party that you finally meet people you like in the act of seeing them off. 

I've been invited to quite a few going away parties for people I don't know. One of them ended with the demise of a vodka-soaked watermelon and the host, no longer just a friend of a friend, morphing ever so slowly into the guy with the curly hair crying and mumbling into my shoulder that he would miss me soooo much when he moved to Portland tomorrow. 
"Who are you?!!!" The short French host with the fiery eyes yelled at me last weekend when I went inside to use the bathroom. I explained how I came to be standing in her house and she responded by grabbing my hand, demanding of her husband that he pour me champagne (into a shot-sized Dixie cup), pulling me over to the map of France affixed to a post in the living room (so guests could locate the couple's new Bordeaux-adjacent village), pointing to the bathroom, and finally throwing popcorn at me. She was the best host I've ever had the privilege of encountering. 

Back outside by the fire, I talked to a shark researcher. These were the people I had been hoping that I would meet here in Virginia. The marina where we're living is within walking distance of the Virginia Institute of Marina Science and every day when I cut through the campus to get to the beach I like to pretend that I too, am making important discoveries that will help reverse the damage that industrialization and intrusive fishing methods have done to marine life.  I asked the shark researcher a lot of questions. He was possibly annoyed by me. He told me that his dissertation was on the life span of deep sea sharks. These are determined, apparently, by tracking down sharks going about their own sharky business miles and miles below the surface and and hauling them up to check out their spines, which build calcium over the years in a way that is just as indicative as the annual rings on tree trunks. So, basically, in order to see how long these sharks have lived they have to KILL them. I suddenly became much less worshipful of marine biologists.

Turning back to the fire (which was smoldering and crackling and doing all that a good fire will do) from within a handsome wheelbarrow set in the middle of Wolf and Popcorn Lady's back yard, my thoughts darkened. I sipped on my cheap beer and seethed over the ethically dubious scientists I keep hearing about on the news, the ones contributing to drone proliferation as we speak. Were they not in the least concerned about their complicity in the race to create ever-more nefarious government spy technology? And did this shark guy lose any sleep, any at all, after his complicity in the deaths of dozens of large and astonishing prehistoric creatures in order to produce a bit of inconclusive data? It was then, that my ever-blacker thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of a caveman.

To say that he had come from nowhere would be highly inaccurate, because he had clearly just come from within the house. A blonde guy with close-cropped hair in his mid-thirties, he was barefoot and swathed in a very plush sort of torn fur getup. This was not a costume party, and nobody else was dressed up. Not even his tiny blonde daughter, whom he clutched in his arms as he stomped out the coals that had escaped from the fire with his naked feet. "Aaaaarrghh," he cried, and then stomped some more, before turning to me. "Hello, the caveman said affably. "My name's Peter."  I shook his hand but I never did find out what the deal was with his costume, because soon after I was engaged in conversation with a hippie-looking guy (mid-forties, clear aviators, long & messy grey hair) with a cup in each hand- one for beer and one for him to spit his gnarly"chew" spit into. The caveman's wife threatened to leave without him and he ran to catch up. The tobacco-chewing hippie's 7 year old, in bright red-framed eyeglasses, hucked pine cones at the fire from behind the rock garden. The party eked on, like a quiet techno track that never reaches its crescendo and soon the boy and dog and I were headed back through the icy night, hoping dearly that our old car would not take too long to start.