Hubs and I cleaned out our DC apartment this weekend. Last night, shortly after 5pm we looked back, making sure nothing was left behind, and closed the shades, turned off the lights and left DC for good (sans upcoming weddings).
There was surprisingly a lot of stuff left there – shoes (yay!) and some other random stuff (mixing bowls, and our bad ass closet organizer). Then there was The Horn.
You see, back in college, they give college students at hockey games long, red horns to harass the opposing team with. I obtained one junior or senior year and it made the move to DC with me after college.
That horn? Got a lot of play the summer of 2006.
The first time we used the horn as a long funnel was before a party, my bff Tpup came down to Boston to visit and we went to the after-hockey party up on Mission Hill. I don’t know which of us came up with the idea, but it became an epic tradition.
{circa 2005}
The horn subsequently stopped being used at hockey games (new policy as of that year), and I didn’t use it for the above purpose again until I moved into my first ever group house post college.
It was first busted out again before ah-hem what my two male roommates called “mancation” where we had a house full of one roommate’s pals from South Carolina come up for the fourth of july. Now, I’ve gotta say, I’m about as ah-hem Yankee as they come and I do firmly believe that Subaru is the unofficial car of Vermont (thus why we own one); there are four seasons – winter, mud, summer, leaf peeping; Boston is better than any city south of New York (I do love New York, but Boston has a very special place in my heart) and if you’ve never visited either city then you’re greatly missing out; I voted for a socialist; and Sweet Caroline is way better than Dixie ever was as far as bar wide sing-a-longs go. I digress, Southerners? Know how to party.
The horn was first phased in, as I was saying, during Mancation, after a Prime Rib dinner at the Capitol Hill Club.
{note classy shirts}
It was kept in rotation during other parties and festivities as well.
{including a brief stint as an air guitar}
It stuck around, waiting to be used. Good times were had.
{The Horn gets cleaned up. Slight proof of a good night.}
We initiated new roommates (and punished old ones) with the horn…
Only one of them took it like a champ. See above.
The horn was last used on New Years Eve in 2006/2007. By the end of that year, I had moved in with Hubs and the Horn moved into a corner, not forgotten about, but left alone. I was no longer the “crazy party gal” I was once dubbed as – though never to a Lindsay Lohan extent, always within reason.
But as I rested it in our recycle bin on the side of our street, one of the last things to be brought outside, Hubs asked if I was sure I wanted to throw it away. I could have passed it on. It had some good times and I know a few good homes that would have been happy to take it in, but while good times never die, we do grow up and move on. This horn, was an era of a great many good times with many good friends and roommates who taught me to stand up for myself, who sheltered me from having my heart broken by the same boy over and over again. Friends and roommates who helped me pick myself and my life back up when I needed it. The era of the horn is over – the late nights, chugging Miller Lights, rowdy happy hours celebrating the end of a workday at a dead end job. It was all collegiate-esque. We were all young twenty-somethings just looking to live. A lot. I lived – I danced on tables, I woo-ed, I laughed til I cried and while sure I’m married, and won’t ever chug a malibu and dr.pepper (my preferred drink of choice back in the day), I will love and laugh and remember these times as a few, difficult but necessary and amazing, months. Necessary for me to learn about myself, grow and move on.
An era is over. But will never be forgotten.
Good times never seemed so good…
{The Horn 2005-2009}
