No sweet sixteen.

My friend Johanna has a wonderful pearl of wisdom about aging. She says you don’t realize that you are not 16 anymore while dancing the night away, but only upon waking up the next morning. She certainly has a point and I have proven it over and over again since out of my teens. Yesterday I did realize the upside of not being 16 anymore though. The hangover might be more severe, but now I can cure it with pizza and pinot noir at Massimo’s Sunday lunch and crawl back to back afterwards without anyone berating me. These are the moments when I love being a grown up.

The night which brought along this hangover started innocently enough at a friend of a friend’s house party. The host, a recovering alcoholic, welcomed us and told us where to find drinks. With a laugh she said, we shouldn’t expect tequila, making me think some beer or wine would at least be on offer (My definition of drinks contains alcohol, everything else should be called liquids.) No such luck, I got handed a bottle of sparkling pomegranate juice. The party wore on sober, but entertaining enough, though after a few hours of sitting in the cold with neither drinks nor smokes (It has been a week, thank you very much!) Thekla and I decided it was time to sneak out for a glass. We put on our most innocent faces to pull a quick ‘girls sneaking out of boarding school’ stunt and quietly slipped out of the door only to realize outside that our car was parked in. Stuck on top of a road on top of Highlevel Road we discussed options:

A) Go back inside and skip the drink.

B) Go back inside, trying to find the driver of the other car, potentially having the host find out and insulting her with our intended escape.

C) Walk and freeze as for the first time ever I wasn’t wearing a scarf (Why is another story. Ask my mother.)

Of course option C was the only real option for us and we fully admit we may just have a problem, especially considering that we ended up at The Spur for our red wine and tequila. It was loveliness on a fake cow hide bench. But as Thekla was predicting - at least I got a story out of it.