“Even the longest journey to the farthest place starts with one small step.” -Theodicus There are 263 miles between here and there, a vast swath of land swallowed up mostly by highway roads and open country. I’ve traveled those roads and seen that open country more times than a little, heading back home, but this … Continue reading Going Back: 22 Years
Even her name was an enigma. I always imagined her parents battling it out over a particularly long game of canasta. “I want to name her after my mother, god bless her soul, she died when I was 6 but there was no greater saint!” her mother had probably argued. Not to be outdone, her father contended with, “She has to be named after my sister who took the cloth and is serving as a missionary to Africa.” And because neither one wanted to back down they compromised as couples often do, saddling their lone child with the name of Heather-Marie.
Now don’t get me wrong. It is a lovely name, both parts of it. Heather reminds me of beautiful flowers blowing in the breeze on an autumn day, and Marie is the girl who everybody likes, the quiet, self-assured angel with the killer smile. Together the names should have been magic, but no one explained this to Heather-Marie.
I met her in the midst of my longest summer. My heart had just been crushed by the woman I thought would be my forever and I was in what I felt was eternal pain. Amazingly enough, Heather-Marie became my salvation, but not at all in the manner that I had intended. And it all began with a band. And the internet. And the fact that I couldn’t drive. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This post isn’t about me. It’s about Heather-Marie.
She was an aerobics instructor at a gym, and as a result she was one of the fittest people I had ever met. I was fresh out of adolescence and my metabolism was working overtime, so I thought I could do pretty much any exercise even though I wasn’t quite in shape. It’s what I told her during our first phone conversation, when I was bragging about still living with my mom and never getting my driver’s license. Oh, and it’s also when she told me she went to a nudist camp once.
I liked her at once because she was brutally honest, even from the start. She also had absolutely no problem with picking me up and taking me somewhere, or even that I still lived with my mother. The age difference, though, that gave her pause. You see, I was 20 and she was 28, and she worried that even though we seemed compatible over the phone that her advanced life experience would cause problems for us in the “real world.” Luckily for me that wouldn’t end up being a problem. Nor would our difference of skin color. Yeah, she seemed like a perfect match.
But then life went into fast-forward, we had about 10 more phone conversation, and our first date was finally staring us in the face. Go figure, Heather-Marie hit it off with my mother, who was entranced by her tales of teaching spinning class. I think she would have signed my mother up on the spot if I hadn’t hurried her out of there. We had an amazing time, too. The meal was great, the conversation sparkling, and I believe I even made her forget all about the age difference. We went on a long walk and the words kept flowing. I felt that spark that I hadn’t since my relationship had fizzled earlier that year. It went by way too quickly, though. Continue reading “Heather-Marie”
I’m a night person. Okay, I used to be a night person. I guess it’s all just a matter of perspective.
When I was a kid I wanted to stay up as late as humanly possible, sometimes inventing fake “illnesses” in order to stay up just a little bit longer. Then I became a pre-teen and discovered 90210. But it came on at 9 o’clock, which also happened to be my bedtime, and my mother was super-strict. Luckily I got a VCR as a teenager and was able to record it, but it just wasn’t the same. You know?
Finally I became a young adult and I could pretty much stay up as late as I wanted. So I did. Often back then I wouldn’t go to sleep until 2 or 3 in the morning. The problem was of course dragging myself up out of bed when the alarm clock sounded the next morning, always way too soon for my tastes. Oh yeah, and I was in college, so I can’t tell you how many morning classes I missed due to my night owl habits. In fact, I showed up for one of my morning classes 3 whole times one semester.
It was pretty obvious I would have to find some balance or I would fail all my classes just for lack of attendance. But I just was not tired when a “normal” bedtime would come around. 8 o’clock, nope. 9 o’clock, still wide awake. 10 o’clock, just getting started. 11, 12, 1, and the time would keep moving while I watched TV, played video games, read books, listened to music, or all of the above at the same time.
Sometimes my mother would stop by my room on her way to bed and wish me a good night, giving me the look that said, “You know you should be going to bed too,” without actually saying the words. Her point was a valid one, one that I finally had to confront head on when at the end of my third college semester the school placed me on probation. You see, I hadn’t shown up to any of my classes for four weeks, and some of my professors thought I had dropped. When I arrived two classes before the final exams they told me in stereo that I wouldn’t be able to take the test. I hadn’t logged enough hours of seat time in each course.
That hit me like a ton of bricks. All the time I spent staying up late, getting up whenever I felt like it, it was all coming back to poison me like some erstwhile apple in fairy tales. There was no longer any time to “take care of it later.” The time was upon me, and I began making some drastic changes. Continue reading “The Early Bird”
I should have known better after the Santa Claus debacle, but apparently I hadn’t learned a thing because less than four months later there I was in an Easter Bunny costume. I have absolutely no idea how they talked me into it, honestly. All I know is that one day my boss was hinting around about having something special planned for Easter, and the next he was showing me this giant head. And boy was it heavy!
Just to get you back up to speed, I was working for the Philadelphia Vision Center during my senior year of high school handing out flyers in the outlying neighborhoods in the general vicinity of the Vision Center in Southwest Philadelphia. In addition to handing out those flyers, they had co-opted me into being Santa Claus for the previous holiday season, a thankless job with a beard that itched more often than not. So, there I was looking at a giant head that probably weighed more than a bowling ball, and I was honestly considering it.
For starters, they were going to pay me more for it, to the tune of a couple more bucks per hour, and I wouldn’t have to deliver flyers for two whole days. You see, there was some type of bazaar in a local school gym where all manner of businesses were invited and given tables to advertize. It was engineered as this amazing revitalization of the community and local business, although the local aspect of each business was debatable. It was for two days, the Thursday and the Friday before Easter, and the Vision Center had been invited.
Thinking back on it, I think the only reason we were invited was because of that Santa thing I mentioned earlier. My best bet was that the community action folk decided we would be the most probable to have an Easter Bunny costume. Go figure. And of course the getup required someone relatively tall to fit into it. Enter me. The dunce. Continue reading “The Year I Was the Easter Bunny”
Okay. I will be the first to admit I haven’t dated all that much in my life. By the time I was dating age (i.e. 17) I was finally a senior in high school, but I was going to a large public school where I knew pretty much no one, and I was afraid to approach most girls. The one girl I got up the courage to ask out laughed in my face, so that wasn’t a good batting average for me. Needless to say, I didn’t ask out another girl from school that year.
However, I also went to church, and my mother was always suggesting I go out with one of the good Christian girls there. But so many of them I had grown up with, and it would have just seemed weird to want to court one of them. Well, except for this one girl, but she treated me like a brother, and I didn’t have the hurt to damage that relationship in order to try and craft another one out of its ashes. There was another girl, though, who was relatively new to our church, and I finally just asked her out.
GIRL #1
She had short, dark brown hair and a smile that never left her lips. She was also world-smart, meaning she didn’t come originally from a church family. So she was not really the sort of girl the preacher’s kid was supposed to be going after. I suppose that made her more appealing in my eyes. I asked, she said yes, but it was the date that never happened. That seemed to happen a lot to me for some reason. Just say no if you don’t want to go out.
GIRL #3
Me and Girl #3, we actually went on a date. Seven of them to be precise. I was 20 at the time, but a lot more world-weary than I should have been at that point. We met first online, and our initial phone conversation was horrendous. But we still met in person, which was a good thing, considering we hit it off from the start. We met, we wooed, we made exchange of vow. And yeah, as you can imagine, things went much too fast. I guess it either went nowhere, it went too slowly, or it accelerated swiftly back then for me. I think I scared her away. But those were a nice seven dates. Continue reading “Dating by Numbers”
Every picture I’ve ever seen of myself tells a story. Sometimes that story is a wonderful one of redemption and joy, but other times it’s the story of a boy fighting against himself, trying futilely to get somewhere. Still other pictures bring back memories of times and people that have been long gone. Some names I don’t even recall, but their faces ring true all this time later. We had that moment. We shared at least the amount of time necessary to seal that memory behind glass for the world to see.
Out of all the people I’ve taken pictures with, the one who appears the most in those photographs with me is my sister. We are only 15 months apart in age, and many people assumed we were twins back then (much to her chagrin — she’s the older one). But we took a host of photographs together, many that still exist to this day. I think it’s because our parents (but mostly our mother) decided she wanted to chronicle our growing up years. Isn’t that why most parents pick up a camera in the first place?
I have pictures of us from Florida, with huge Mickey ears plastered to our sweaty foreheads. And there are pictures of us at Dutch Wonderland, posing next to Barney Rubble, looking like rubes. Still other pictures are random ones from around the house in Southwest Philly, us posing by not posing. Mixed in are also the stock photographs we would take every few years in the back of the grocery store where the picture people would set up shop. I wore ties for those. I am smiling in all of them. I love my sister, and it shows through even back then when I tried to be mewed up to my heaviness. Continue reading “Every Picture”
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