Monopoly With Friends (Old Long Ago)

Monopoly with friends is comfortable. We talk smack, exchange fake bills with glee and frustration, laugh and laugh again, and groan loudly when a certain someone lands on Free Parking--AGAIN--and rakes in our taxes and dumb fee money.

This New Year's Eve, we've consumed lots of water and chocolate and near-misses on the Millennium Edition board. It looked so futuristic twelve years ago, but its shine is too metallic now and its tokens quaint (a ginormous cell phone and a roller blade. Chortle with me, now). But life is like that, isn't it, especially in these long evenings that go by so quickly and that turn into years, and years. We don't know what's coming next year, whether the cliff will serve us a belly flop, whether we'll get an unexpected raise or a much-wanted child or a surprise move or none of the above, or whether our friends and family and dear ones will suffer and love and cherish and go homeward, heavenward. What comfort then that no matter the monopoly that sin and the unknown hold over us, that our lives are in trust.


But I have to go now, here in these last moments of 2012, because Papa's about to win the game. Happy New Year, friends. For Old Long Ago, my dears.