For our sixth date of Christmas, we went to a late dinner Monday night at our local hole-in-the-wall Indian restaurant. We were out kind of late, and by the time we got home (close to 8pm), neither of us had any desire to figure out what we had food-wise in the fridge and then assemble it into some type of meal. KC said, “How about Indian?” and my heart skipped a beat — this, my friends, is called romance. You know, when you’re dog-tired from running around Christmas shopping and working and balancing everything else in your life and all of a sudden your husband just takes the reigns and is like, “Hey, don’t worry about this — I’ll take care of it.” And so, he may as well have said, “Hey, how about I take you to Gary Danko and we can feast on foie gras and gaze at each other over the white tablecloth and polished silver?” because that’s really how it sounded to me.
And so we had a no-frills meal of spicy chicken, lentils and rice, eaten off of old, scratched plates and rounded out with beers served in the strangest glassware. We sat on chairs on the concrete floor, in front of the space heater they had rigged up in an attempt to keep the place above freezing temperatures, all while listening to the blasting music from the belly-dancing studio next door that seeps through the walls (a muffled Beyonce yelling about a “beautiful nightmare” isn’t typically “mood music”). I spilled about half our rice on the floor throughout the course of the evening (I’m just not very coordinated sometimes); but it was a perfect night. We ate slowly, and talked about everything from work to Christmas to what we think next year will be like.
Our lives (and everybody’s lives, I think) are so full and busy that sometimes it’s easy to just whoosh right by each other and resort to calling our hour on the couch watching the news “quality time;” so it’s nice to take a time-out once in a while for just the two of us and let all that busyness fall away. And it doesn’t matter so much where we are — whether it’s sharing the 2003 Cabernet over steaks or drinking cheap beers while eating way-too-spicy samosas — in the moment, it’s perfect. It’s nice just to take a breath, and know that the gifts will get wrapped, grocery shopping will get done, and trash will get taken out eventually, but right now it’s just about us.
Six dates left, and enjoying every minute.