so winded, so sincere

Thank you this week to Sarah, for keeping me warm.

I bought my wedding dress last week. It took 45 minutes. I should have gone with my best friend, Lisa, but she just left for Vanuatu for two years with the Peace Corps so I went by myself. When I found my dress, simple and satin and on the clearance rack for $299, the girls at the shop made me ring a bell. I was supposed to make a wish on my dress so I did. Then, as I was walking through the parking lot back to my car, one of them came sprinting after me. "WAIT! You forgot this!" Breathlessly, she thrust a paper heart at me, the same one that had been hanging on the door of my changing room. It had my name written on it in sharpie. "You'll want this for your memory book!"

The girl was so winded and so sincere that I took the heart, pressed it carefully into the pages of my complimentary Bridal Party Look Book, and hugged her. There's just something about the women who work in those dress shops. They seem to care about you, not only about finding your dress but about you, and I don't care that they're paid to do it, I love them for it.

of course this is not my dress!

When I got home, I skimmed through the complimentary Bridal Party Look Book. Here's a tip, I read. Ask your bridesmaids to show up on The Big Day with dewey skin and a pastel eye.

I wondered what would happen if I told my sister she needed a pastel eye. The world would tremble, certainly. When I called her to announce my engagement, it was my brother in law, Brooks, who answered the phone. He loves David, especially loves having him around during the holidays, so he was thrilled and said so, while from the background I heard Anna shout, "I'M NOT WEARING ANY BULLSHIT DRESS!"

Anna is my maid of honor and my cousin is my bridesmaid. Lisa should be in my bridal party but, as I made mention, she is long gone, living in a string of islands whose only claim to fame, as far as I can tell, is having the world's only underwater post office. Before she left she begged me to delay my wedding until February of 2017. When I declined, she sent me some leaflets on Vanuatu destination weddings. I reminded her that father Coogan doesn't like water. And then she left.

I hadn't really noticed that she was gone, she lives 3,000 miles away in Seattle anyway, until last Friday in biology lab. The one that begins at 8:00 in the morning, and I can't think of anything more cruel. On this particular lab, the morose professor was standing in front of the class making an analogy about legos and organic molecules when he paused, held up a hand, and said, "Wait a second now- I just want to make sure that all the ladies in the class know what a Lego is."

Let me make something clear- I love it when he does this, when he hands me a pearl like this one and I can run home and tell Dave about it over dinner, then call up Lisa as I'm walking the dog and we can laugh and she'll say, "Oh Lina, I still don't understand why you moved."

Follow along on Instagram @melinadream

But when I called her the phone number didn't work any more. So I just walked up the street with the dog in silence, thinking about one particular time we had together. We played on the same ultimate team for years and years in college. We were both captains. The practices were always late at night, because that was the only time we could rent the fields, and afterwards we'd be soaked to the bone and freezing cold. It really does rain a lot in Seattle.

Sometimes, to warm up afterwards, we'd run a hot bath and put on our bikinis and soak together. We did this a lot after I moved into a house that had one of those extra large tubs with jets. One time, we decided to put bubble bath in the tub and then turn the jets on, just to see what would happen.

Well, here's what happened. The jets puffed up the bubbles into foam: thick, heavy, luscious foam like the kind from Harry Potter when he takes that incredible bath. It was awesome. But then, after we had drained the tub of water, the foam remained, a foot deep. We tried adding water, but that only made more foam. It was obvious that the foam was not going anywhere and we were in a lot of trouble.

We thought for a while about what to do. We were both scared of my roommates at the time, not that they weren't lovely people, but they were the type to know better than to air-jet a bubble bath. I suggested getting a pail or a pot and scooping the foam out of the tub and emptying it into the yard, but we did not want to go into the kitchen and arouse suspicion. Besides, it would have taken so many trips!

In the end, we were able to get rid of the bubbles by flushing them down the toilet and hammering the rest with a direct shower stream. It took so many flushes, in fact that may be why Lisa ended up joining the Peace Corps, to assuage her guilt of so much water wasted. Me, I'm still living with mine.

It's been a few weeks since the last Mystery Prize Monday. If you have forgotten, I give you a prompt and you leave a comment. I read and enjoy every comment, but I must randomly choose just one to win the Mystery Prize, which I will then send to your doorstep.

This prompt is very simple but also very sincere. (Picture me, running after you in a parking lot, a scrap of paper in my hand for your Memory Book.) Just tell me how things are going. Today. Or lately. It's been a little while and I really want to know. Tell me how you're doing. And also, if someone, anyone, could please tell me what a Lego is.