Halfway there.

I’m officially middle-aged. Let the cloud yelling commence!

But, no, I am more likely to sit on a park bench with my lightly creased middle-aged friends drinking peyote juice, giggling all the way to death’s doorstep.

Let me get a few grievances out of the way:

-My birthday was yesterday. Not enough people congratulated me on my life being half over. If this was you, please hang your head in shame.

-November is easily the worst month of the year. Cold, rainy, and mostly dark. If it was you who invented November, go fuck yourself.

-BSOs. $300 isn’t pocket change, but it can not reasonably be used to purchase a bicycle. BSO = Bicycle Shaped Object. Don’t have bicycle money? Buy a skateboard: they’re safer and more reliable than BSOs.

-$9 for one pound of strawberries at Fairway Market? It’s still a better deal than BSOs, but I guess bananas are the only fruit I’ll eat for the foreseeable future. 79 cents a pound, bitch.

-It takes almost two hours to get to White Rock from the Tsawwassen ferry terminal by bus. 35km! Probably faster to get there by skateboard.

Thankfully, Alana saved me the trouble of taking the bus from Tsawwassen to Jenine’s place in White Rock. For the first time in years, I found myself among a group of signers. It was euphoric. When I wasn’t signing with one of the six people at Jenine’s place, I could just glance over and find a different conversation to jump in on. Hearing people experience this all the time, and they really take it for granted. When I share with a hearing person the difficulties I face at work as the only deaf person and how isolated I often feel, I find that hearing people like to minimize my struggles by pointing out how they work from home, or have had the experience of working alone.

It’s not the same. Truly. It’s one thing to be stuck eating plain oatmeal at home because you’re poor and another to be the only one eating oatmeal at a restaurant because you’re poor while everyone else is having a grand feast and nobody thinks to offer a morsel of their gourmet fare. I’ve also had the experience of working alone, and I can tell you that it’s much more relaxing than being surrounded by a laughing crowd: people who make the occasional eye contact and somehow don’t ever think, “Hmm, perhaps Laura would like to be included?”

That is not unique to my current work environment. My previous workplace was the same. Growing up, even my family was ignorant to how much they excluded me.

Friday’s cast was composed of a few people I hadn’t seen in years: Alana (2 years), Jenine (5 years), Bob (only met him once, the last time I saw Jenine). Ryan was there: I rode with him up Mount Seymour in September. Alma, Alana’s girlfriend, came along. Also, one of the two babies I’ve ever held stopped by, Jenine’s daughter, Lexi. Lexi is 22.

Jenine didn’t have any peyote juice in the fridge, but she was able to offer some of the THC beverages she accidentally smuggled across the US border. Mmm… illegal legal drugs.

Another deaf experience I hadn’t experienced in awhile was when the lot of us sat down in a restaurant, and all eyes were on us. As an individual, I get overlooked all the time, but there’s power in numbers. Whenever I dine out with a hearing person/hearing people, as soon as the server realizes I’m deaf, they default to my hearing companion. That was not an option for our server at Charlie Don’t Surf, although I doubt that was her first deaf rodeo as she cleared the hurdle of getting us to pay our bills individually. Some of us were so caught up in a conversation that I had to intervene so the server didn’t have to spend another awkward minute standing there with the payment terminal.

We returned to Jenine’s afterwards, causing one of her cats to retreat to the guestroom. Nobody left early, not even Alana who had to work the following day. The pandemonium finally fizzled out at 1:30am. When I woke up later that morning, the scaredy cat, Neptune came out to say hi.

There’s no photographic evidence of the gathering. We’d all gotten so carried away that we forgot to take photos. But here’s evidence that Alana, Jenine, and I go way back. Waaaay back.

I found the time to photograph her other cat, Hippo, who is just four months old and has yet to develop a distaste for crowds.

Getting to Vancouver from White Rock (50km) by bus later that morning took an hour. I like my hairdresser so much that I’ll cross the strait of Georgia to get my hair done by him. What’s another hour on a bus? I was also excited about spending some time and bucks at Dressew afterward. Dressew is a massive fabric store that has a true bargain basement. Any rolls of fabric that don’t sell after a few years get banished to the basement, where they remain with their original price tag until they’re so cheap that their hideousness can finally be overlooked. I didn’t emerge from that basement with a basket full of affordable fabric. Oh, no. One of my choices was $22/m.

I could’ve easily spent another hour in that store, except I needed to head back south to visit my opa in Surrey before catching the 5pm ferry home. I got to Opa’s at 3:15, and my uncle showed up 25 minutes later to drop me off at the ferries. It was there and then when I decided to impose a two-night minimum for all future trips to the mainland.

Here is the reason my uncle gave me a ride to the ferries from Opa’s:

It’s my late oma’s sewing machine, which is now mine!

Opa responded to one of my emails in which I talked about taking sewing lessons, noting how he still had Oma’s machine. He warned how nothing happened when he plugged it in and pressed down on the foot pedal. I was hoping he didn’t realize that sewing machines usually also have an on/off switch–or in the case of this particular machine–a button. Even if the machine didn’t work, there’s a sewing machine repair place in Victoria. But… It does!

Opa warned me that the machine was heavy. I didn’t think so until I lugged it down the ferry terminal corridor to berth 5. The longest walk in the world. Jordi was my heroic driver on the island side, transporting me and the machine back home.

My oma kept the manual:

1974! Back when only homemakers used sewing machines. Back when the Willis Tower was the Sears Tower. Back when you could mail a handwritten letter with questions about an appliance. Back when sewing machines were all-metal.

Yep. I’m 40, and a proud owner of a 47-year-old sewing machine.