“What are their names?” she asked.
“Sal is the oldest and he’s married to Laci, a lawyer who fights for the underdog usually. They have a little boy and are about to have their second child. Then there’s Thomas and his wife Victoria. They have twin boys and Victoria is pregnant again with their second set of twins. The next in line is Giuseppe but everyone calls him Gus. We have no idea why my parents placed the horror of that name on him but don’t feel sorry for him. He’s married to his new wife who is also pregnant with her first child. I’m the next in line and the youngest brother is Carlo who isn’t married yet. The youngest in the family is Antonia. She was the first to get married and is very happy with her husband Brett Hancock. They have two children, a little girl and a boy.”
“Wow! That sounds like a huge family.” Darcy couldn’t even begin to recite all the names again. There were too many. And she’d lost count of the children after the first few he mentioned.
“I also had an older sister, Sophia. But she died in college.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, sensing that it had been a terrible tragedy for his family that still hadn’t healed.
“What was it like growing up as an only child?” he asked, changing the subject from a painful time in his life.
Darcy shrugged. “Quiet. My parents loved to read. And we didn’t have a television. My parents hated TV thinking it was a waste of time to watch it.”
“Do you have one now?”
She grinned in a self-deprecating way. “I have one, but I haven’t taken it out of the box. I got it when I graduated from college and got my first apartment. It was sort of a defiant move on my part. I decided I was going to watch television every night for hours in rebellion for a lifetime of missing all the television shows, hearing about them at school and feeling left out because I couldn’t relate to what the other kids were talking about.”
“How was it defiant?”
“Well, it was only an attempt at being defiant. I never told my parents about buying it. They would have been upset with me.”
Michael threw back his head and laughed. “I guess the silent rebellions are usually the most effective, huh?”
“Not really,” she grimaced. “I would need to view it for it to have been a serious rebellion.”
He chuckled but nodded his head in agreement. “So why haven’t you taken it out of the box?” he asked.
“Well, initially, I was waiting until I bought my first house. It didn’t really fit into my apartment since the rooms were too small. But then I bought my current house and couldn’t find a place for it. Each place I tried, it just looked bulky and awkward. The shelves were already filled up with books or boxes of books so I just kept pushing it from one corner to another. Eventually it got pushed into a closet and I forgot about it.”
“So you still don’t watch television?”
“Nope. And I don’t miss it anymore.”
“You don’t hear the others talking about the shows in the kitchens?”
“Sure I do. I’m just grateful I didn’t waste my time watching the silly shows,” she grinned cheekily. “Have you heard of some of those shows on now?”
They talked for hours and Darcy couldn’t remember any other time she had felt so free to talk about whatever came to mind. Later that night when she was climbing into bed, she realized that she wasn’t able to talk to her parents the way she talked to Michael. They were too cerebral and wanted only topics they considered “enlightening” or mentally “uplifting”. With Michael, she could talk about anything, even if the subject was completely irrelevant or outlandish. Occasionally he was just as far fetched which made her feel good about her outrageous thoughts.
Darcy woke up Saturday morning and wondered how she was going to fill her day. Remembering Michael’s comments from the previous evening, she made a commitment not to work. Unfortunately, she had no idea what to do otherwise. She stood in the middle of her family room in wool socks and a sweatshirt, her usual sleeping attire, and wondered what normal people did on the weekends.
She thought about her response when Michael had asked her if she liked to ski. She was now embarrassed that she’d never taken the time to do anything fun or adventurous.
Darcy made a pot of coffee and sipped the steaming brew while contemplating the lack of adventure in her life. She sat down in her well-worn, armchair, the only chair in her family room, and propped her feet up on one of the boxes of books she still hadn’t unpacked from her move several years ago.
As the coffee woke her up, she contemplated her life, what she’d done and where she’d gone. anywhere. school. Their social studies teacher had given them an assignment to draw a map of the world with all the countries. She and her friend had spent hours coloring in all the countries of the world. They had poured over books, discovering facts about each culture and dreaming about the day when they would travel around the world to exotic and romantic places.
Or, more to the point, the fact that she hadn’t really done anything or gone
Darcy remembered a conversation she’d had with a friend of hers in high
Looking around her house, she tried to remember the last time she’d taken a vacation. She’d been working for six years since she’d graduated from college and she’d only been on a few weekend trips to nearby states. She’d been to Maryland and West Virginia, but that was to see college football games. Darcy suspected that she’d be hard pressed to consider those romantic or exotic.
Sipping her coffee, she accepted that she was only twenty-eight but she hadn’t really done anything adventurous or crazy yet. Was she missing something? Was there another life out there that she should be living? Darcy genuinely loved her job, but she looked out the window of her kitchen and saw the trees for the first time since moving into her house and knew that she was missing a lot in life.
Over her second cup of coffee, she sat down in her kitchen at the folding table and chair that she used to eat her meals on and made a list of all the things she’d always wanted to do, but never taken the time. It was difficult at first, but once she started, the list went on and on. At the top, she had sky diving, scuba diving, snorkeling, hang gliding, riding a motorcycle, dancing, rock climbing, running a marathon… and towards the bottom, she had items such as pottery, ballet, gourmet cooking, gardening and horseback riding.