Pleasure and love

Larry’s reading a letter I’m writing to my brother.

I have a lot of problems relating to my brother because of a bad thing he did and went to jail for a long time ago and which we’ve barely even talked about even though what he did made things very hard for me.

Larry’s going to make suggestions about better ways to say things. I usually forget any diplomacy when I’m seriously expressing my feelings to people. He’s going to point out places I completely skipped over important things I feel. Suppressing feelings forever and then learning how not to doesn’t mean you still don’t continue to suppress the juiciest ones you can barely stand to feel.

Yesterday we dropped Jacob off at overnight camp. It’s the first time he’s been to one. He really wanted to go.

We were embarrassing him lurking around wanting hugs and kisses and to make sure he was going to be okay. He barely paid attention to all the last minute instructions we were giving him that we forgot to tell him on the three hour drive up there, actually it was more because of the horrendous traffic on the 400, but he was okay about our mentioning a forty dollar credit for him at the tuck shop.

We stopped in Gravenhurst on the way home, a place Larry remembers from vacationing there and thereabouts when he was young. We ate in the finest restaurant we could find and ordered a bottle of red wine to go with our meal.

We’re learning how to drink wine and took turns describing the one we were drinking. First we couldn’t come up with too many words. The more we drank the easier it was to come up with words to describe it. We were very funny.

Initially I toasted to “pleasure” but Larry thought that was too hedonistic so I toasted to “pleasure and love.” Then, as our funniness increased, Larry got on the theme of appreciating one another and I said that was the reason I toasted to “pleasure” and Larry felt bad because he thought I’d switched it to only “love.”

But I explained to him that he’d heard wrong, I hadn’t taken out the “pleasure” from the toast, I had just added the “love.”