11.18 Favorite Memories - 7-Eleven

Bestest Friend and I are in the middle of a blog project. Each day of the month we will post a picture on a pre-determined theme and write a little something about it. The theme for the eighteenth day of each month is "Favorite Memories."
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It was a time in which cell phones were rare, dial-up was still pretty common, and we had a shared answering machine.  My roommates were Rakanel, a girl from Mexico who was surprised "you aren't at all like the girls on MTV" and whose friends would begin each message with a super cheerful, loud "BUENO!"and then Spanish words so incomprehensibly fast that my two years of college foreign language classes failed me and Mama Joy, a girl in her late-20s, so obviously OLD, who was a functioning alcoholic lesbian whose friends would begin each message with mumbling in depressed tones that made me want to reach through the magnetic tape and give them all hugs.

Most nights Mama Joy would convince me to walk up the giant hill to a 7-Eleven. I would slip in ahead of her (underage, you know) and make myself busy at the Slurpee machine (I like half a red kind and half a white kind) while she would buy herself enough alcohol to make it through the next 24 hours - you know, maybe a 12-pack or two bottles of wine.  Sometimes she'd buy beer in plastic bottles and throw them across the room when she got mad.  Once she forgot a bottle of wine wasn't plastic and threw that, too.

For reasons that escape me, these are actually fond memories.  Traipsing up the hill in the cold (it was always cold in my memory), hearing Mama Joy's stories about skipping work and one night stands and smuggling cold beer into movie theaters, and getting a sugar rush from the Slurpee and skipping home with Mama Joy shuffling behind me - these are the things I think about whenever I pass by that familiar green and orange sign.
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To see what Bestest Friend wrote about the theme of the day, check out her blog, Too Legit to Quit.