Thursday, May 13, 2010

Writer's Workshop: The Mystery of the Missing Shoes

"Christy, I can't find my shoes. Have you seen my shoes?" Peter said.

"I haven't seen them. Are you sure you were wearing shoes when you got here?" I answered.

"Ummmm. I think so."

Peter and I and our 23 classmates had just completed our Master's degrees in International Conflict Analysis at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England. It was a two-year degree crammed into one year, and we had worked our tail feathers off. Seriously.

Ours was one of the brightest classes the University had ever seen. More than 20 percent of us graduated with distinction. Typically, that number would be less than 10 percent.

Though you'd never know it from the way we celebrated at our graduation party.

Much like we had at our Thanksgiving party, we drank. A lot. Enough that shoes disappeared and their very existence was questioned.

I recall making Pimm's with something called "light, white mixing spirits." It was grain alcohol, pure and simple. And that stuff did not go down smoothly, let me tell you. But it went down. As did the wine, the margaritas (warm, no rocks, because we were in England and apparently ice is more valuable than gold there), the beer, and probably a few other things I don't exactly remember.

The weather was gorgeous and we were outside. At some point most of us removed our shoes. And at the end of the party most of us were hunting through the bushes for Peter's shoes. I'm sure our professors regretted granting a few of our degrees with distinction as they watched us.

Many of my classmates have gone on to do brilliant things. (Of course, only one of us went on to do brilliant things AND had triplets!)

Peter is in the midst of a very distinguished academic career. Kristen has done some amazing work at a couple different embassies. Every time I reconnect with Amanda she's in a different part of the world solving problems. Elisabeth and Ananda both work for the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo.

A brilliant group indeed.

But we never did find Peter's shoes.

Play along with Mama Kat's Writer's Workshop. This week's prompt was to tell about a time you found yourself barefoot, but we writers are allowed a little creative license, no?

Mama's Losin' It


© Trippin' Mama 2010

2 comments:

AlittleLess.ALittle More said...

Fun post! ur Triplets ar really cute

Mary said...

I had forgotton what your masters degree was in- it never ceases to amaze me the sense of humor GOD has!