The other night, Stick and I went to a wine tasting, where I clarified my life goals.
Um. Yes, I suppose that needs an explanation.
We stopped in to a wine tasting at a small shop, just another thing I like about Charlotte. By the chardonnay, we’d exchanged the Massachusetts liberal secret handshake with the group next to us.
One woman had been an English major, such a fan of Pride and Prejudice that she once convinced her husband to read it to her. Only once, though, because he skipped parts. Which was instantly obvious to anyone who really loves Jane Austen, of course, and I knew just how she felt, since I once read a copy of Pride and Prejudice with typos. Her husband and Stick immediately wandered off to talk about football, and possibly the horrors of living with a woman who tries to take an interest by cheering for the correct color.
The two women were lawyers and now professors of law at a local college. After a mutual rant on text message-speak slipping into students’ essays, they told me they’d recently been to an out-of-town conference in a city that was also home to a historical plantation house, surrounded by local legend.
“Amy and I had a whole day to relax before the conference,” she said, “and you know what she did? She dragged me to the Registry of Deeds.” (Please note: I had no idea there was a physical registry of deeds. I forget that sometimes you have to go to your information, instead of it coming to you.)
“Where we looked up the house.”
“And we found the deed.”
“Which was an irregular lawyer-babble lawyer-babble entailed on the heirs as a lawyer-babble!”
“And we did the happy dance.”
“The Registry of Deeds happy dance.”
Look, I’m still not entirely sure if the heirs owned the property and let the historical society use it, or if the heirs has defaulted and the society had picked up the slack, but I do know that I want the Registry of Deeds happy dance. I want to do something so interesting that I want to do it on my days off.
