The Michael

The children and I spent the day with Michael, one of my dearest and oldest friends. Michael is just like family, so much so that we tend to refer to each other as brother and sister. Our history is so long and inclusive that most of the time it's just easier to refer to each other that way rather than explaining our relationship.

When Spyder was little, Michael half-heartedly attempted to get Spyder to call him "Uncle Michael." That never took for Spyder, but he did take to calling him The Michael. Neither one of us knows how that came about, but it's stuck. Even now, Spyder and Sass both refer to him as The Michael. I can't explain how, but it's even capitalized in their voices. Michael signs all of his cards and postcards to them as "The Michael."

Michael has had work issues recently, and his schedule has been very erratic. I don't think we'd seen him since Christmas, so when he emailed on Wednesday, we all jumped at the chance to hang out today. Spyder must have even dreamed about it because when I woke him up this morning, I could hear him (still asleep) muttering, ". . . pizza with The Michael . . . ."

It was quite an excellent day. We met at the Pizza Cafe for an early lunch, then zipped over to the bargain theatre to see Flushed Away. After the movie, we spent the rest of the afternoon at the children's museum. Nothing overly exciting, or even unusual, other than we normally don't do all of those in one day, but it was incredibly nice to have a day to hang out with The Michael.