Three weeks ago I got an email from the husband of one of my best Arizona friends, Laurie. It said something like this:
"I'm throwing a surprise 50th birthday party for Laurie on October 7 and it would mean the world to her if you were here."
My gut reaction was, "there is no way I can go." Airline tickets are so expensive right now and and I just couldn't justify the expense.
My next thought was: "Maybe I could use some of John's miles. But I bet even the mileage would be really high this close to the travel date."
But I checked anyway, not expecting to find good results.
Boy, was I wrong! I could go to Phoenix for the least amount of miles, 25,000! I talked to John and he said, "Go!"
I said, "Even though that means I won't be home on my birthday?"
He said, "Go!"
He knows I've been wanting to go back and see all my Arizona friends. I'm the only one who hasn't been back to Arizona or had my Arizona friends come to visit.
He's awesome!
So I booked my flight.
And I was beyond excited.
It's been an amazing weekend! I got into Phoenix Friday morning and had arranged with one of Laurie's co-workers to surprise her at work for lunch. I went to Paradise Bakery, one of my most favorite eating establishments (there is not one single Paradise Bakery in Georgia!), picked up her favorite BBQ chicken salad, my most favorite chicken walnut salad sandwich, and then bought some of my most favorite molasses cookies. They only have these cookies in the fall/winter, so I felt very lucky that they had them already. They were buy-1-get-1-free, so I bought 6 and got 12! Woohoo! I'm going to take them home and put them in my freezer and enjoy them throughout the year. Well, except for the one that broke. I ate part of that one. And it was to die for!
I arrived at Laurie's work, went to her desk, and when she saw me I thought she was going to faint. It was so fun!
After lunch I had some time to kill before she got home from work so I drove around town. I drove by our house. It was weird that we don't live there anymore. One of our new renters works at Varsity, so there's still a Varsity vehicle in the driveway. Kinda' funny.
I drove by our old church, where we spent so much time and have so many memories of our Arizona family, and where I taught seminary for two years. John and I got to pick out all the artwork for this building while it was being built. That was really fun!
I still had some time to kill and some homework to do so I went to my old library.
I have great memories of this library. We used to go quite often and the kids always did the summer reading program. It's built next to the Surprise park where there's a huge playground, volleyball courts and a large lake. On the back end of the library there are huge glass windows overlooking that lake. I sat there for a couple of hours and enjoyed the lake view while I did my homework.
It was awesome!
My assignment for Laurie's party was to get her to the party without her knowing what was going on, so I got to lie for once without any dire consequences. I must say I did really well with this lie, although it felt very strange. I told her that a lady from our ward in Georgia had recently moved to Arizona (this part was true - a family from our ward just moved to Buckeye, which is outside of Phoenix). This is where the lie starts: I told her that this lady had heard I was coming to Arizona and she had something she wanted me to take back to Georgia for her and that we could go pick it up on our way to our joint birthday celebration that night. We were going to get ice cream or something. I thought this up in the shower the morning I left Georgia, which was the morning of the party. I was getting pretty frantic by this time as to how I was going to get her to the party, which was being held at a random house in the desert, without her suspecting anything.
Anyway.
She totally bought it. Her husband had told me that we needed to go in the gate between the house and the garage. "Great," I thought. "How am I going to get her to go into a gate?" So a few minutes before we got to the house I called her husband, Steve, pretending like I was talking to the Georgia lady, and said, "So you want us to come in through the gate. Okay." I told Laurie that we needed to go in through the gate because the people were having a BBQ. We got to the house and there were a lot of cars parked in the lot in front of the garage. Luckily she didn't notice them. There were chinese lanterns and lights strung throughout the area between the house and garage. She did notice them. I said, "Oh, they're having a big BBQ tonight."
She totally bought into that, too.
We walked through the gate and her two sons ran out, with everyone else following them, and said, "Surprise!"
She was very surprised! I was a sucessful liar. Mission accomplished.
It was a fun party. I got to see lots of Arizona friends and we got to get caught up on each other's lives.
I also got to go to have lunch at Paradise Bakery Saturday with two of my most favorite YW/seminary students. It was very fun!
I also got to go to my old ward for church yesterday. I hadn't told anyone I was coming so that the surprises wouldn't get ruined, and it was really fun to watch peoples' faces as they saw me walk into church. It was awesome!
I love my Arizona family.
Steve had Laurie take a vacation day today, so we're going to spend the day together. We're having lunch with another friend this afternoon at -- you guessed it -- Paradise Bakery, and then we're meeting another friend and going to see The Help. It will be my fourth time seeing it (once with John and once with each of my girls), but that's okay because I love that movie and Laurie hasn't seen it yet.
And I'm not disappointed at all about going to Paradise Bakery three times in 4 days. It's. That. Good.
It's been an awesome weekend. As I've driven around town and seen so many friends, many, many memories have filled my mind. Wonderful memories.
And I'm so thankful for them!
0 comments:
Post a Comment