The other day I was checking my voicemail and because I'm terrible about deleting old messages, I had to listen to the old ones before I could listen to the new one.
So I pressed "7" and Steve's voice comes on. He called the day he left for Germany to say goodbye. I was on vacation in Key West and had left my phone in the hotel room while I was sunning myself on the beach, so I missed his call. By the time I tried calling him back, he'd already left.
I can't bring myself to delete his message so I keep saving it in the archive. Today I decided to use my technical prowess (and I use the word prowess loosely) to make a digital recording of it. I don't know. Just in case.
In that last part of the message Steve is thanking me for driving down to Virginia after work one night the week before he left to have dinner with him and our family.
I was cursing the rush hour traffic in Northern Virginia (which by the way makes Route 30 on a Friday look like an abandoned road in the Mojave Desert), thinking it was stupid to have driven what ended up being 3.5 hours to spend a couple hours with him before turning around and driving back to Pennsylvania for work the next day.
Of course when I got to the restaurant where we were meeting for dinner (Sweet Water Tavern for anyone who is ever down in Centerville, Va. really tasty food) all that cursing melted away and I soaked in the evening with my family.
It was the first time we'd all been together since last Thanksgiving (although we were still missing my oldest brother Michael, who lives out in Texas).
We were a noisy bunch -- Steve and his wife, Liz, my parents, my sisters and their husbands and my little two-month-old nephew, Emmet.
We laughed and told stories. Steve held court as we gave him things to take with him to Afghanistan: A digital camera, an album filled with pictures of the family and a pillow that my mom made with notes penned on the back from everyone.
We probably overstayed our welcome. Eventually, everyone filtered out and hugged goodbye. But Steve, Liz, my sister Jen and I lingered. I hugged him once and told him to be safe. Then hugged him again for good measure. Then drove back to Pennsylvania ... grateful to have had the chance to see him.
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