Shake, Battle, and Roll

This story took place nearly eleven years ago. If we talk often, you've probably heard it before, but for me, this one never gets old so I wanted to share it here.

After Christmas break my freshman year of college, I came back to find I had been assigned a new roommate - Lara - and would no longer be living alone. It would take me hours and hours to explain how it happened, but against all reason and all my expectations, this bubbly former-sorority-girl and I became BFFs within a year.

One afternoon, we were sitting around our room chatting when my dad called and asked if we wanted to go to a reenactment of the Battle of Aiken. I was in the middle of declining when Lara, the kind of Southern girl who could make Scarlett go green, picked up the other end of the Swatch twin phone and declared that we would LOVE to go. This was how I ended up cold and cranky and trudging through mud at seven in the morning just a few days later. In contrast to my crabbiness, Lara was downright jubilant, skipping ahead of me and then doubling back to breathlessly report on what she had just seen. "Oh look, a rabbit purse - I want that! Hey, sassafras soda - I want that! Look, a petticoat - I want one!"

A few minutes later, she interrupted her recitation to grab my arm and drag me away from my parents, dramatically explaining that she needed a cigarette but that good Southern girls don't smoke in front of parents. As my mom and dad continued on, Lara and I cut through several tents and she fished around in her over-sized purse for a cigarette. "The ground is jumping," she calmly announced as she searched for her lighter. She stopped to light her cigarette as I continued on, expecting her to catch up just a moment later. It took me about four steps to notice she hadn't, so I turned to see what was holding her up. Lara stood still, her lit cigarette clutched loosely in her fingers and halfway to her mouth. I noticed she was making a weird face - one eye was bigger than the other and one side of her mouth drooped down. Assuming she was making fun of some hapless Aikenite, I giggled and turned to see who her target was. I turned back just as she stiffened and headed for the dirt. Somehow, I got to her before the ground did and grabbed her as she fell, dragging us both down into the mud. Once on the ground, Lara stretched to her full five-and-a-half-foot length before balling up and violently twitching her way through the first grande mal seizure I ever witnessed. Not knowing what to do, I crouched over her and tried to hold her down while screaming at her to stop as she spit blood and foam.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up as a tall and hugely bearded man dressed in gray pulled me off of her. A shorter but equally-well-bearded man dressed in blue blocked my view of Lara and the two went to work on her. Nearby, a woman in a hoop-skirted-dress pulled a cell phone from her bodice and called 911. My parents showed up just a moment later, drawn to the crowd. I ran to them, screaming that Lara was dying, because what other explanation could there be. I'm pretty sure that seizure remains the scariest thing I've ever seen.

A few seconds later, the seizure was over and Lara's eyes were slowly coming back into focus. As the haze cleared from her brain, one of the two men crouched over her asked, "Do you know where you are, honey?" Lara looked, wide-eyed from one bearded face to the other before bursting into tears. "I don't even know WHEN I am." (A love of Southern history and a vague belief in reincarnation are a bad, but entertaining, combination.)

A four-wheeler pulled up and the men got Lara and I loaded on the back, as she didn't want to go without me. At the front gate, she was loaded into an ambulance, but again refused to go until she talked to me. Stepping into the ambulance, I leaned forward. "Get my fake ID out of my purse so they don't think I'm the wrong person," she whispered before laying back dramatically, possibly with her arm thrown across her forehead.

My parents and I followed the ambulance to the hospital, as I clutched Lara's purse in my hands and concentrated on not throwing up. We waited a little while before we got to go back to see her. Sitting in the hospital bed, flirting with the young doctor on duty, it was hard to believe this was the same girl who had been twitching and spitting foam just a couple of hours earlier. Feeling better, she was more concerned with getting her hair brushed and going to lunch.

Later that day, we left the hospital with a diagnosis of epilepsy and a bottle of extremely strong medication - Dilantin. The next day, I drove the two of us back to Berry as Lara sat next to me, bouncing along with each bump of the car. Her medication, before the dosage was dropped, made her feel "like a boneless chicken" (her words to a confused professor as she walked out on a philosophy class the next week.) Soon enough, though, we both got used to the changes, and months later she began to randomly make the seizure face to freak me out - her revenge for me making "dead hands" at her in the middle of the night. She also used the diagnosis as an excuse to make me drive us to Taco Bell and Waffle House in the middle of the night, hinting that if she went alone, she might seize and wreck the car - but I can't say that I really minded. More often, I imagine I was happy for the excuse to go for a snack.

Though scary and stressful, Lara's sense of humor and drama eventually turned the episode into a story we loved telling and I have to admit that the line, "I don't even know WHEN I am," still makes me laugh every time. There are many more bizarrely-charming Lara stories, but that's enough for one night. sweet dreams!

Rewind almost one year...

Our first meal in Switzerland
Originally uploaded by Arsmor

So yeah, the writer's block is still hanging on. I've been sitting at my computer, staring at the screen and trying to think of anything at all to write for the past one and a half hours. As a last ditch effort, I started going through Mr K's Flickr stream to see if anything caught me eye. If you're at all familiar with Mr K's photography (he's really really good) then you just know something will catch my eye - and here it is! This picture got me not because of what it shows, but because of the memories it brings back - this picture was taken a matter of hours after we landed here.

The day we arrived was easily one of the longest days of my life. For our 12 hours flight here, we were seated in the very back row of the plane in not one, but TWO middle seats. Our flight left in the evening on the 17th of September and arrived the morning of the following day. I managed to not sleep at all on the flight and Mr K only slept for about two hours, meaning we were pretty much dead when we arrived at the oh-so-tiny Bern Airport.

(It was on the connecting flight from Munich to Bern we learned an important lesson - when the seventeen little old people on one's flight, all laughing and chatting together in Swiss German, pause their conversations just long enough to press their hands against the seat back in front of them during landing, rather than giggling, one would be wise to follow along otherwise one will smash one's face into the seatback in what can only be described as an uncomfortable manner - the landing is that abrupt.)

So, rubbing our recently-squashed noses and grabbing our bags, we leave the tiny customs-free Bern airport and head to our hotel. After nearly destroying a cab with the weight of our massive amount of luggage, we checked into our hotel. Just as I was preparing to collapsed on the gigantic and fluffily-made-up bed, Mr K insisted we go to open our bank account and also find some food. Though I really wanted a nap, I grudgingly agreed as I had been wearing a pretty healthy amount of travelers checks around with me and was a bit nervous I was going to lose the whole pouch of them at any moment.

We managed to open a bank account despite some linguistic complications and then had one more item to deal with before Mr K would finally let me sleep - food.

(By this point I had been awake well over 30 hours in addition to several nights of next-to-no-sleep right before we left. All our furniture was gone, so we were sleeping in blankets on the floor of our house right up until the day before we left.)

The problem with us wanting to eat was we weren't hungry during the nationally-sanctioned-times-of-meals (noon to two in the afternoon and six to late in the evening). It was around 3:30 or so in the afternoon and there was no way I was going to be able to wait until six in the evening to eat. Fortunately, Mr K remember we could get some hot food at Migros (grocery and department-type store chain) and there was a location located between the bank and our hotel.

The food was served cafeteria style, so we grabbed trays and tried to make a choice. I was so hungry I couldn't make up my mind, so I just got the same thing that Mr K got - pork on a stick. With gravy. He was good and got veggies but I also got noodles with mine - I was dying for comforting-carbs. Throw in a couple glasses of orange-kiwi juice and a kinderegg for me and I can honestly say it was one of the top five most enjoyable meals we've had since arriving here - not as much for the food quality as just for being hot food - I was almost in tears. After a heavy meal like that, we headed back to our hotel, too tired to even pay attention to the elephants out front, and collapsed.

We actually haven't eaten at a Migros since that day, but that meal will always be a memorable one for me.