Lion and Magic Boy

There’s a story about Nathaniel and time, but I have no time to tell it tonight.

I do, however, have both time and impulse to relate a little tale about ice cream (Serena was craving ice cream today and may have mentioned it a few hundred times).

Whwn I was about 7 or 8 I accompanied my parents on some expedition to the local small shopping center, the one in the middle of town that had the movie theater (2 screens), the Baskin-Robbins, and about 5 or 6 shops. A jeweler’s. Don’t remember the rest.

I was allowed to purchase an ice cream cone and consume it, alone, while my parents conducted whatever business they had.

Baskin-Robbins was a semi-annual or so treat. My dad will tell you that the black cherry was best, but I preferred to try various flavors depending on my mood. Choosing among all those colorful and delicious-looking flavors was often difficult and it seemed like it took hours each time to make a choice.

On this particular day I chose an old standby, a deep and dark chocolate. I felt quite grown up paying for it myself and then slowly walking under the colonnade, peering in the shop windows and eating my ice cream. I had quite a while to wait for my parents, and had to make the circuit more than once, but I enjoyed imagining what it would be like to want the jewelry in the window, for instance, and I read all the posted signs more than once. People passed by me from time to time, and I could imagine them thinking how well-behaved I was, how grown up. I was a little like them, those people, even though they were so much older than I, but we shared this experience of being in the same place at the same time. Some smiled at me encouragingly.

I finished my ice cream and carefully threw away my napkin in a trash container. So grown up. Finally my parents came and we drove back home.

It was not until later that I chanced to look in the mirror, seeing the very obvious after-effects of eating a very dark chocolate ice cream cone still on my face, surrounding my entire mouth.

I’ve had only one vacation where I was totally alone. It was when I was 17.

About two weeks before it, my dad had surprised me by being there standing on the path as I came out of my biology class. I had totally aced Bio in high school but Bio in college was a little harder and I couldn’t snow the teacher with my awesome writing skills the way I could in high school and I was just reaching the point, mid-semester, of realizing that I was going to have to open the book and attend a lab or two to pass the class. I was immersed in those thoughts when I saw my dad standing there, waiting for me. I stopped in my tracks and looked at him. Something was wrong. He didn’t belong there.

We took a bit of a walk and he told me that he was on his way farther north to Arcata where my brother went to school, to tell him the news as well. He also hugged me for the first time in years. And he cried. I had never seen him cry before.

They were getting divorced. My parents.

In an instant, my world changed. The couple I thought would forever be a constant in my life was splitting up. I was going to have to apply for financial aid. My free ride of an education was over. Life as I knew it would never be the same again.

An hour or two later, my dad left and I was alone with my thoughts. What was I going to do? How was this going to affect me?

More importantly, what about spring break?

I couldn’t go home…home wasn’t home any more. My dad had moved out. Neither parent had anything good to say about the other one. Tension was in the air.

I couldn’t go home with my friend Lish, not after having been raped a few weeks earlier at a party the last time I went home with her. I wasn’t ready to deal with those memories yet.

I decided to take a drive down to Big Sur. Alone.

Armed with a six-pack (it was a handy thing to look older than my age) and a map, I had no plan other than to follow Route 1 down the coast. And I knew someone from school who lived in Salinas, Steinbeck country, a kid we called “Turtle” because of the way he held his head when he walked. Maybe I’d look him up.

It was warm, driving. I rolled the window down and leaned my arm along it as I drove. My beers sweated in a little cooler. Stopped for awhile, inching through a construction zone, I considered handing one of my beers through my open window to the flag guy, hot in an orange vest and deeply tanned. I wish I had. In my other memories I did, and I briefly basked in the glow of his gratitude, his white teeth flashing for an instant in his tanned and worn face.

When I got to Big Sur I continued driving. I had no idea what to look for. Yep, there was the ocean, down there below the cliffs. So? The ocean. Okay, what next?

I went on to Salinas, not knowing what else to do, and spent the night huddled in my car in a large parking lot, hoping no one would disturb me. In the morning I looked up Turtle’s number and called him.

Sure, I have a place to stay, thanks. A movie, though? Okay…

I drove all the back roads and side roads all day, waiting until evening when I went to Turtle’s house. He didn’t invite me in. We went to the movie and I drove him back home. He didn’t have a car. Although I didn’t like him, I let him kiss me. Payment for the evening, I guess. After awhile he escaped from my car and bolted back into his house. At school again after the break I couldn’t look at him, and didn’t talk to him again until he helped me home to my dorm one night after I took someone’s bet to see who could drink more Tequila shots.

We had been friends and now we weren’t. I had had a family and now I didn’t. Life seemed as directionless as all the back roads and side roads around Salinas. I cut my hair and got yelled at by the director of a play I was cast in. The play folded before it began and I took my student loan funds and left school. Life happened, a lot of it.

The ocean sounds nice right about now.

I think I’ve got it figured out.

It came to me yesterday as I was on my bike ride, trying unsuccessfully to dodge the unusual number of tiny suicidal bugs in the air. Airborne, they looked like tiny fairies, their wings lit briefly by the angle of the waning sun, but on my bare arms and bare legs they felt like a rain of tiny beads of hail. I was being pelted by bugs. Tiny bugs.

So I’m now smoothly using the shifters on the new bike (you KNOW I kept it, of course!), reflecting on the first time I rode it, testing it out of the bike shop. They asked me if I was familiar with the shifters and I said semi-doubtfully that I had ridden a bike with them a year ago once, and waited for the guy to give me a brief rundown. He didn’t. Naturally I couldn’t ask him at that point, so I got on the bike and started riding.

It didn’t take long to figure out how to shift into a higher gear: I could see the lever, and a slight flick with a finger moved it to the side and shifted. Cool. Now we’re humming!

Oh, a hillish area. Better shift down, it’s getting hard to pedal. But…where is the lever thing that shifts down? Isn’t it right…here somewhere?

I pulled over and stopped the bike, and poked and prodded everything I could see in the area of the shift lever that I knew how to operate. No go. Nothing seemed to move. Damn.

So I tested the bike in the one gear, sure the bike shop people would be oh-so-impressed with my shifting acumen and my high-gear ability.

Oddly, every time I got back on the bike after we made various tweaks and changes, the gear was at a lower position. Was it shifting itself? How can that be?

So I took home a bike, basically, that I had no idea how to operate.

However! I figured that instructions could be found somewhere online. It’s not like I could, say, call the bike shop or anything and ask. That would be…painful.

Oh, have I not mentioned my problem with phone calls?

No?

Let me enlighten you then.

Once I broke it down like this: if I am calling a complete stranger, I’m okay. I can make the call. Like, say, making a reservation for something or ordering something (back in the dark ages when one had to use a phone for such things) or getting information on store opening times or something. Actually, all this can be done online now. Interesting! I may never need a phone again!

And, if it’s someone I know well that I’m calling, have scaled the Wall of Communication with and I know I am welcome anytime, then it’s okay too. Naturally, there aren’t many people in my life who fall into this category. I can think of 2.5 of them, maybe 3. Depends on my mood and the day.

But! if it’s someone I know only slightly that I have to call, it’s impossible. There are WAY too many variables involved, and ALL of them involve me making an ass of myself. Or at least, my supposition that I will do so. For one thing, I am convinced that someone I know slightly will not even remember who I am, and then I will be forced to explain this, dying of embarrassment at the same time.

See? This makes total sense, doesn’t it?

Once when I was about 12 I had to call the library to find out their hours. It was excruciating. I think it took most of a day to find the courage to make the call.

But that doesn’t approach what I did to poor Joe Arrietta.

Joe was a freshman to my sophomore and he inexplicably called my house once. My mom came to tell me I had a call and that it was him. I had never actually received a call from an actual boy before, so not only was it a novelty but I had no idea what the protocol was. And I was immediately convinced that he was calling for one reason: to ask me out.

Problem was, I had no interest in him. Zero. None. Hey, he was a freshman, after all! And his head was quite large. And his dad was my Social Studies teacher, which gave poor Joe extra pariah status. Mr. Arrietta was a decent teacher despite the apparent color-blindness that caused him to wear monochromatic outfits (all black for test days!), and his evident love of golf clothes that resulted in many pairs of plaid pants of all hues, but I basically enjoyed him (and he obviously didn’t hold my treatment of his son that day against me, as I continued to get A’s in his classes and a year later he nominated me for Girl’s State, and I went, but that’s another story entirely). I wondered if he knew his son was calling me. Ew.

So my mom tells me I have a call. From this kid Joe. I ask if I have to answer it, she gives me an odd look and says of course I do. I am allowed into the Parental Bedroom Sanctuary to have the necessary privacy with which to take this most sensitive call. I hesitate. I lie on my bed, hoping the situation will go away. It doesn’t. Ten minutes later my mom pokes her head in my door and asks me if I’m done on the phone. I mutely implore her for help, but her face remains impassive. Like Death with his bony finger, she silently points toward the Parental Bedroom Sanctuary, issuing the command. “Go. Answer. The Phone.”

I slink into the sanctuary. At once its usual darkness is stifling rather than welcoming. I sit on the side of the bed near the phone, and look at it. It’s off its cradle, lying carelessly on the night table. Taunting me. I tentatively lift the receiver and hold it. I cannot lift it high enough to listen or talk; my muscles remain paralyzed. I quietly set the receiver down again and let out a long breath. I get up and look out the window. I try not to think about the breathing, waiting person on the other end of the phone.

My mom comes in. “All done?” I point to the receiver lying wounded on the table, again hoping for help. I whisper fiercely to her, imploring, “Just tell him I’m not here!!!”

“No.”

And she leaves me again to my misery, my fate.

Finally, after about 45 minutes of agony, I lift the receiver to my ear. And hear a dial tone. Joe has hung up.

The event was never mentioned again, and he never spoke to me.

Joe, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry. I hope it didn’t scar you for life or anything. But surely you can understand my handicap here.

Once a few years ago I was assigned the task of calling a bunch of school parents and asking them to donate money to the school. Great — phone calls AND begging. Together. I failed at this and eventually they assigned the task to someone else, much to my relief.

So you see why calling the bike shop to ask how to use my damned shifters was completely out of the question.

Nevertheless, I could turn to the internet for that, and it wasn’t long before I was happily, if not somewhat tentatively at first, shifting up (and down) through my gears.

See, my theory is that the internet was invented for people like me. People who can hide their dorkitudinousness by just looking stuff up in secret.

And then we go and blog about it publicly.

P.S. I’m going to BlogHer tomorrow, if I can get on a plane. Yay! Hundreds of women in one large conference ballroomy place! Rather like my idea of hell, actually, but I plan to have a wonderful time. Rooming with this one and that one, both of whom give great email. And blogging.

[tags] Shimano Ultegra, cycling, blogging, phone paranoia[/tags]

[I was barely 18 when I wrote this. Can you tell? (<----that's irony)]

Farewell
to the carefree days of youth
when Mommy tucked me in and read me
a story,
and Daddy threw me high in the air
and caught me, laughing.

Farewell
to those books and games
and children’s things
that kept me young inside

There is no time for
sweet reflection;
No time to change direction.
My feet point forward,
and it is forward I must go–
Over seas of despair
and waves of depression;
mountainous sighs
and rivers that rise.
This I must conquer
and divide
or fall.

So farewell
to those days
And farewell
to the me that was then.

Wave goodbye.

—June, 1981

[tags]cringe, poetry, college, pain[/tags]

I have been remiss.

I have forsaken you for the allure of the almighty dollar. That’s right, I have been using my precious blogging time to rack up some pretty nice posts over at Babble, if I do say so myself. So, shameless self-promotion? Why, yes!

Here’s one of my favorites, about the need for play, even as parents.

You go read that, and then come back.

I’ll wait.

[tapping foot impatiently]

Hey!!!

Don’t be getting distracted over there!

[wheedling tone] Don’t you want to hear a cringeworthy story about my awkward teen moments?

Ha. I knew that would bring you back.

Okay then.

Am I supposed to change the names here? Hmm. I will consider that. Meanwhile, ponder this:

I have mentioned before that I believe in reincarnation. Part of this belief extends to the one that says that we plan certain elements of our lives before we live that life. In other words, we choose parents, mates, and others, and we choose challenges or issues to exist between us or to be presented in the course of these relationships. So when I say that I have received information that the overriding purpose of the relationship I am about to describe was to set a pattern for my subsequent relationships, you know where I am coming from.

Scott was not handsome. In fact, he was rather an “odd duck”, a phrase uttered by an old boss of mine many years ago that has always stuck with me because I rather like it. He was a year ahead of me in school, a junior to my sophomore. His younger sister was in my grade and we were not quite friends but more than acquaintences. I was vaguely aware of Scott as his sister’s older brother, but didn’t think much about him beyond that.

Until One Day, when he walked with me around the track around the football field and regaled me with his dream of owning a pink hearse. I am pretty sure he was saying this to impress me.

Not long afterward, he appeared at a cast party from a play I was in and we stayed and talked and eyed one another. Soon we were going to movies. Well, A Movie. I even remember what I wore: A light-blue terrycloth short-sleeved top. And I had just had my hair permed and I imagined I looked like Julie Christie in Heaven Can Wait, which if you haven’t seen I can’t help you beyond telling you that it was supposed to create an effect of a soft blonde halo around my head. Okay. Moving on. Now understand that I was then 15 and had yet to go on an actual date. I had been kissed before, once at a skating rink and later in an even more cringeworthy situation that may or may not ever appear here, but my point is that my romantic notions were taken from the pages of Little Women and maybe from Hallmark commercials.

So you won’t be surprised to learn that this date turned into an obsession on my part, and when his idea about what our relationship was apparently didn’t match mine (I had let him, uh, touch me! In, uh, places! Weren’t we, like, engaged now?) I had no choice but to write him pining and whining letters, listen to the soundtrack from “Grease” on the radio and my pathetic “The Best of Bread” album all summer while listlessly doing jigsaw puzzles and playing pingpong with my brother and waiting for Scott to call so my life could begin again.

I did see him a few more times that summer but I finally got the hint after a trip to an amusement park where Scott spent more time talking with a girl running one of the rides than he did with me and later remarked that it was just like the song “Magnet and Steel”, a reference that I never fully understood, but took it to mean that he was just a player.

So I pulled myself together and began my junior year with a bang, wearing on the first sweltering day of school a corduroy skirt suit with brown leather boots and a hat. It was my preppie year and I often appeared at school looking like a junior VP of an accounting firm, ready to extend my Dale Carnegie handshake to anyone.

This apparent change in my demeanor did not go unnoticed by Scott, and by the end of the month we were a couple, which lasted through the fall and winter, through all the performances of our play “The Crucible”, past Christmas when I did not receive the engagement or even the promise ring that somehow I had convinced myself would appear, and until right about Valentine’s Day on which he took me to the appallingly horrific movie “Ice Castles”, after which he told me he wanted to date someone else and by the way he was breaking up with me.

Devastated, I threw myself into my modeling career and into the upcoming production of “Oklahoma”, where I had been named Laurey’s understudy in order to force the preferred Laurey (I was the better actor but she had a stronger voice) to choose between cheerleading and the play. I was totally being used and I knew it, but felt I had no choice and at least I got to rehearse “Surrey With the Fringe on Top” a few times with the dreamy Curly who everybody had a crush on.

Re-enter Scott, disillusioned perhaps about the allure of the girl he had wanted to date, a little miffed at seeing me with a social life, and STUPID ME goes right back and even allows herself to be talked into doing unmentionable things under a blanket that fooled no one on the choir bus trip to Oregon (“blue balls”? I can’t believe I fell for that one), plus further unmentionable things later that summer after he had graduated and had nothing to lose after which which my diary entry said something like: “I am a woman now.”

Then Scott went off to college and I fell into a new world with new friends who ingested illegal substances and soon I couldn’t care less about my Econ final or getting into Bryn Mawr or Mt. Holyoke or Smith or Wellesley, and Scott became to me kind of a pathetic whining loser-guy. The shoe was on the other foot and I couldn’t get away fast enough.

I could have learned a lot from this experience but instead I doomed myself to keep repeating it for quite a long time. So, thanks, Scott, you did your job well. I don’t hold it against you, and in fact I kind of wonder where you are now, what your life has been like. I hope it’s been good.

My first kiss came from a boy whose name I no longer remember, someone at the roller rink my friend Paula and I used to frequent on Friday nights in the 7th grade. She’d wear her embroidered jeans and we’d skate round and round in our laced-up white boots to the sound of “Benny and the Jets”, already an oldie but very new to my tender ears that were raised on alternating silence and the booming bass of the cannons in the “1812 Overture”.

It was clear what Paula and I were there for: the skating was secondary, but here was a place to meet boys! Lots of boys! Mostly we knew none of them, for the rink was far enough away from home that our anonymity was secure. In short, I could be anybody here, and no one knew, for instance, that I was a year younger than all my classmates and the last to wear a bra. So I’d throw on my tight knit purple sweater, the hippest thing in my wardrobe (which could not compete with those embroidered jeans), and hope for the best while bidding one of our parents goodbye in the parking lot.

On many occasions Paula and I were approached by a group of boys who made it clear that they wished to hang out with us. Usually this would consist of skating in the general vicinity of the boy or boys, while Paula and I hung together and whispered a lot. Sometimes we’d join in a game of crack-the-whip, which would up the ante considerably in that hand-holding would be involved.

We knew that once it got to hand holding, this was serious stuff and we’d have to hold back on the whispering.

A couple of times a night, the management would take a break from the usual counter-clockwise circle or the Hokey-Pokey, and dim the lights, throw on a disco ball, and call it a “couple’s skate.”

This, of course, was the ultimate. Just you and The Boy, out there holding hands, skating together. There might even be some conversation involved, but usually I was concentrating too hard on not falling.

One night, a particular boy and his entourage tailed us all night, and when the lights were dimmed I had the sinking feeling that it was me who would be chosen to skate with him. Yep.

So round and round we went, my hand in his sweaty one, feeling on display, knowing that everyone in the rink was watching me, judging me by who I was skating next to.

Did I mention that he was shorter than me?

So the song is about to end, and the poor guy leans over for a chaste kiss on my cheek.

My first kiss. Ever.

Just then, the wheels of our skates lock together, I go down, and he goes zooming across the rink.

I did score a phone number, though, the number that Paula used to taunt me with for years afterward: 876-9191. (Or was that 867-5309? No, that was Jenny’s number.)

I still remember the number, just not his name.

Life is like that, I guess.

Here’s a little something from my diary from college! (This should be interesting.)

Ah, new love. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? Oh, to be 18 again!

What I couldn’t “forsee” , nor probably could poor XXX, was that I broke up with the guy 13 days later.

I’m cringing now.

[tags]high school mentality, cringe, embarrassing[/tags]