Before school started last Monday, I had a glorious two full weeks off from both school and work/internship. While a good amount of it was spent getting things done around the house, I also got to do something truly wonderful: visit my longtime friends Craig and Brooke and their daughter M in their home in Milwaukee over a weekend!
I met Craig over 10 years ago (side note: my GOD, how has it been that long?) when we were both working at the same polling firm in Washington, DC and formed the kind of trauma bond one can only have with someone who has also survived working for a truly terrible boss. We discovered that we had similar personalities and also liked the same kind of music, and Craig took it upon himself to introduce me to music he knew I would like that I hadn’t heard before. Eventually, I ended up joining the music nerd listserv where he’d met his wife Brooke.
Speaking of Brooke - Craig enjoys cooking and hosting people, and on the occasions he had me over for festivities such as concert pregames and Super Bowl parties where he and Brooke would cook a dinner of regional cuisine from one of the teams playing, all from stratch, I got to know Brooke and we got along just as well as Craig and I did. Brooke and Craig became two of my closest friends in DC, and we enjoyed shows, restaurants, games of Cards Against Humanity, bourbon, and even an impulse trip to Philly to see a second night of The Replacements’ 2015 reunion tour together.
However, Craig and Brooke had lived in Milwaukee for several years before coming to DC for work and missed their home city badly. In the summer of 2015, Craig got a job at a company in Milwaukee and Brooke was able to transfer to an office in the city as well, so they left DC for good. I was so happy for them both, but also missed them badly. We stayed in touch frequently through texts and social media (the wonders of the digital age!), supported each other through some major life challenges, and I’d made it out to visit them a couple of times - once for a Two Cow Garage house show and once while I was visiting Wisconsin for focus groups and squeezed in a breakfast with them. But those visits were a long time ago, before the pandemic…and before a very important development.
7 years ago, Craig and Brooke had a daughter M. I’d gotten to meet her when she was just a little baby, maybe 8 or 9 months old, during the focus group trip. I held her while we ate breakfast and brought a book since she loved being read to. But I didn’t get to visit again since then, and she’d grown up from a little squishy baby to a kind, energetic, creative, silly, sassy kid! I saw photos and videos of her often, but it wasn’t the same as seeing her in person, and I couldn’t wait to see her again. I tried to make a visit last November work, but with 1L year and sleep apnea, it just wasn’t in the cards, so we rescheduled for an August weekend.
When I arrived on Friday, we had a relaxed evening since M was still getting over a minor cold. We got grilled cheese, burgers, and custard from their neighborhood restaurant, I got to see their lovely home (last time I’d been to their house, they were still living in an apartment all the way across town!), and M showed me the songs she was learning on piano and some of her karate moves. After M went to bed, Craig and I hung out downstairs and I attempted to teach him Crusader Kings III, one of my favorite video games…though I play on a laptop and my lack of familiarity with the console version meant I was perhaps not the best teacher. My bad.
Saturday morning, we went to a neighborhood farmers’ market for breakfast (a delicious Eastern European apple pastry for me, I forget the exact country it was from) and to pick up some fresh veggies and bread for the week, then to a wonderful neighborhood toy store so M could get presents for a friend’s birthday party later that day…and I surprised her by letting her pick out a present from me for herself! She chose very well, though she seemed more interested in playing pretend with the “vending machine” part than actually making the jewelry. (Hey, it’s her present, she can do whatever she wants with it!)
That afternoon, while M was off at the birthday party, Craig and I hung around the house listening to music and…while I would like to say both of us were cooking, in reality Craig was making delicious homemade sweet corn ice cream and cornbread “blondies” as well as dinner while I worked on job applications and occasionally stepped in for sous-chef activities like helping cut the green beans and keeping the custard well-stirred. We had a lovely dinner of salmon, green beans, and baguette slices with a beurre blanc sauce, followed by the aforementioned homemade ice cream and blondies for dessert. (My God, y’all, Craig can cook.)
Sunday morning we’d originally planned to go to their Episcopal church for a service, but we were getting off to a slow start and decided instead we’d just head straight to Milwaukee Irish Fest so we could see an Irish dancing troupe including the children of a friend of Craig and Brooke’s. We took the HOP streetcar downtown to the waterfront and got to the stage just in time to see the lovely performance!
After the show and a stop for beer (of course, one is required when in Milwaukee and at Irish Fest), we made our way over to the playground and to a children’s show M wanted to see. After that, we split up for a bit, with Brooke taking M to get her face painted (she made for a very ferocious-looking tiger) while Craig and I went to peruse the genealogy tent. They had several books of surname origins, and while I knew the origins of my family name Hoey, I wasn’t familiar with where Quigley, my paternal grandmother’s maiden name, came from. Turns out they had both names in one of their books!
We met up with Brooke and the tiger formerly known as M for a delicious lunch and some traditional Celtic folk music before heading home for the day. On the way home, we went by a neighborhood park and saw some friends of the family there with their kids, so we stopped to chat and let M play and run around with her friends (very useful for burning off extra energy!) while the grown-ups chatted. We picked up dinner from MKE Bento, which was so delicious, and spent the early evening playing outside with M - I even got to see her ride her new bike up and down the alley! Once it was time for her to have a bath and go to bed, Craig and I hung out downstairs playing video games and watching old concert clips on YouTube until it was the adults’ bedtime.
I had to leave early Monday morning, but M got up early just so she could give me a goodbye hug! It was such a joy to spend the weekend with my dear friends exploring the city they love so much and getting to know their daughter. I can’t wait to go back.