So last night I am sitting in my
apartment after a longish day at work, I logged around 8 hours or so.
Don't get me wrong, they were productive hours but by the time I got
home all I wanted to do was relax. I was playing on my iPad
bouncing between MPQ and Facebook. I popped a couple of things up on
the blog page here when I went back to Facebook and my eyes lit up.
There was a post on my newsfeed from the National Weather Service,
which has a monitoring station out by Greater Pittsburgh
International Airport. They were reporting that they were seeing
snowflakes, so it was officially the first snowfall of the season.
Anyone who has been around the page for more than a minute knows what
hat means, I have to drop everything and go have a hot chocolate.
Way back in the day, when I moved
into my first apartment, I met Hope, she lived on the other side of
the building. The building was two connected units, each side had
two apartments on the first floor and three efficiency apartments on
floors two and three, I lived in the middle apartment on the second
floor on one side and Hope lived in the rear apartment on the second
floor on the other side.
Growing up in the sticks I had
never met anyone quite like Hope before, in my hometown they would
have scoffed at her and called her a hippie (which couldn't be
further from the truth but, oh well) and I don't know how her and I
met or began to hang out, probably just my boyish charm or lack
thereof. But anyway, her and I would end up spending time together,
we would watch movies together, or go jogging or go sit outside Frick
Fine Arts building on the Pitt campus and just read, her usually a
book or poetry or something along those lines, I would usually have a
newspaper in tow.
I have written in here before
about hot chocolate, and the Pirates game and going to the ballet,
all cherished memories of time I had spent with her. As far as hot
chocolate goes, we had started a tradition where during the first
snowfall of the year we would meet up and have hot chocolate
together. I would be lying if I didn't say I probably fell in love
with her, and I was hoping we could see something more come from our
friendship, but it was never to be.
Finally I had reached a point
where I knew what was what, she was never going to feel about me the
way I felt about her and I had decided to quit putting my life on
hold and move on, I had planned on going on a date with someone I
worked with at the time, so I came home after work and got ready and
got about the business of me being me. I noticed that it started
snowing outside, it was the first snow of the year, but I paid it no
mind, I had a date to get ready for after all, when my phone rang.
It was Hope, she was calling me from work and wanted me to meet her
about something. It sounded important and since she worked a few
blocks from my apartment I figured I better go see what was up.
I get to where she worked, it was
in an office at the Pubic Health building on the Pitt campus, so I
make my way up to her floor and knocked on the office door and there
she was with the lights out in the office, save for a desktop
Christmas tree that was decorated with the lights on and Hope was
there with two hot chocolates. My heart literally melted. Nobody
has ever done anything quite like that for me before (or since for
that matter).
Ever since that day I make it a
point during the first snowfall to drop everything I am doing and go
have hot chocolate. Last night, trying to get hot chocolate at 1:30
in the morning was a bit of a challenge, first I went to the corner
store but Numan was out of hot chocolate, so I turned and walked back
to the gas station at the other end of my street where I sometimes
get my coffee in the morning and grabbed a hot chocolate from there,
then made my way home and climbed under some blankets with happy
thoughts in my head.
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