Recipe for simple pleasure

My mom is pretty funny. Especially when paired with a glass of wine. It doesn't take much, a half of a glass will do just fine, and soon a giggle will slip out and a mischievous grin, and she'll say or do something that makes me smile, and I love it because she's so innocent. I'm a lightweight like her.

Last night we're hanging out, Mom, Ricardo and I, having a nice conversation about camp and then goofing around, and I got to thinking that life is so good when you enjoy simple things with the people you love. That there are no formulas for this kind of enjoyment, but if there were, one of them might be:

Mom + 1/2 glass of wine + hula hoop + good conversation + Jenga + Ricardo + BBQ kettle chips = simple pleasure

Mom puts Ricardo and I to shame with her hula hooping skills. I think she could go for like an hour or something, looking like it's nothing more than a Sunday afternoon stroll. She says she can't do it that long, though, because it bruises her hip bone.

And then we got to talking about bruises, and I conducted a little bruises show-and-tell for them. Starting with my left ankle, and my calf, my left knee and then the huge black and red splotch on my left quad. Just when the nasty bruise from my canoe trip began to fade on my right calf, I quickly replaced it with three more. And then there's the fading pink scab on my right shoulder, the bruise beneath my chin, and my middle fingernail that's still hanging on its hinges from slamming it in the car door three months ago. Mom's face looked pained, always a mother, probably wondering when her adult daughter will grow up and if she'll live to see it. Ricardo just shook his head in disbelief and laughed affectionately, "Ay contigo. What am I going to do with you?"

Mom wanted to make me promise to take a break from intense outdoor activity after my upcoming triathlon. She tried to reason with me to throw my bike away. "I will take a break, I reply, "after the Hell Run in October." And then I grin wickedly, trying to also appear innocent. "After all, I'll simply be scaling walls, crawling through mud, under barbed wire, through a junkyard of old cars, leaping over fire, running through water, you know, that sort of thing."

"Ay contigo," Ricardo says again.

I taught Mom how to say something slightly bad to Ricardo in Spanish and we laughed our way through Jenga, until I knocked the TV stand it was resting on precariously and it toppled over (I still vow it's the stand's fault). It's hard to rival evenings like this. Hopefully these are the moments I'll remember when I'm old.