Station.

Today, in my mind, I had friends and friends of friends, and complete strangers, over to my blue farmhouse.

We grilled on the patio, and near a tiki torch some musicians sat playing "Goodnight, Irene" as the sun went down and I finished a beer. A few folks fell asleep on our porch, which is fine because it is huge and furnished and affords a cool breeze. I brought them blankets and glasses of water.

In the yard, away from the sleepers, we played croquet by the light of a bonfire and enjoyed fresh strawberries and scotch before lying in the grass and talking about our hopes.

Today, in my life, I have no grill or patio or yard.

I slept until noon in my apartment before having a panic attack. Every friend I have had plans, and my mother turned down two cookout opportunities to do housework. My wife and I went downtown to eat guacamole.

Dozens of people sat smiling and drinking wine in the park across the street from our restaurant, and I cried and I was not them.

Coffee table.

Ignition.

We settled in Chapel Hill the summer after fourth grade. I hadn't many friends in Florida, so I wasn't really losing much in moving, but I also didn't bring anything with me but a few weird hobbies like comic books and collecting shells.

I never was quick to make friends. When Pete and Todd, brothers from three houses down the street, cozied up to me, I was relieved.

They were a bit olive-skinned, with thick, curly heads of hair. I didn't know ethnicities. They seemed exotic.

We lighted model rockets in the baseball park behind our houses. Really, they were just fireworks, with time-delayed stage-engines of solid fuel that gave off huge plumes of sparks. When the engines burned out, you'd have to find where they were plummeting vulnerably to earth and save them before they fell into a tree, or a creek, or the road.

And that's what Pete and Todd and I did for a month and a half. Ignite rockets, watch their fiery trails, and chase them down before they crashed to earth. It was repetitive, but it was fun.

Then it stopped. And for maybe two weeks I didn't hear from either Pete or Todd. School was getting close, and while the weather was just as hot, the days seemed to be getting a bit shorter.

Todd called one day and said I should come over. I don't remember the reason, but I do remember being eager to visit someone.

I walked the three doors down to his house. Their house was yellowish and sat in a small copse. I rang the bell. He opened the door. He punched me in the stomach – the first time I ever had been punched. He laughed and closed the door. I staggered out onto the landing and went home and didn't tell anyone.

Curiosity.

My tenth grade English teacher, the one in whose class Wallace called me out, often cited Nabokov:

“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.”

I like memoirs. Honest ones, fake ones, dishonest ones. The Hemingway I most re-read is "A Moveable Feast." Hemingway's kind of a jackass about people he presumably considered friends, like Gertrude Stein and Fitzgerald. He's especially weird toward the latter, in an oft-noted scene in which Fitzgerald frets about his penis.

So at my first newspaper job, I learned that my editor was a Hemingway fan, and I mentioned how much I loved "A Moveable Feast" because, while it was obviously just as calculated as Hemingway's other voices, it was different and looser and just plain funny and horrible and disloyal.

My editor, Hank, remembered none of this. His "Feast" was a genteel romp through 1920's Paris, all clinking glasses and literary ambition. He didn't remember the scene in the urinal, which to me would be like remembering "The Scarlet Letter" as a book about an island with genetically recreated dinosaurs.

A week later, he wrote a column for the paper's leisure section about having recently re-read "A Moveable Feast." He said he now found it distasteful and childish and unworthy of Hemingway.

Shuttle.

When school was out on holidays, the Chapel Hill YMCA had an all-day program so parents who worked could send their children to the Y rather than hire a babysitter.

On Memorial Day in ninth grade, I met Janeane. It was kismet. We had a sudden bond. We talked about basketball, and books, and our parents, and our friends, and how both of us had hair that turned blonde in the summer and how neither of us really understood why those Coca-Cola rugby shirts were suddenly so popular.

It was a swift and sudden attachment, formed as we rode next to one another in a YMCA van that was picking up and dropping off children, all of whom we ignored in favor of one another's attention.

There were two junior high schools in Chapel Hill at the time, and she went to the one that I did not. We promised to see one another again, in the fall, when school started.

I only ever saw her passing in the hallway. We never spoke again.

On a pier.

This post was originally published at my old site.

“Something is going on and will not stop. You are outside the going on, and you are, at the same time, inside the going on. In fact, the going on is what you are. Until you can understand that these things are different but are the same, you know nothing about the nature of life. I proclaim this.”

Weird things happen — dissonant events we don't put in context or remember. Dissonance is painful.

It's said we rationalize or simply fail to remember things that don't match our other experiences. We trust our senses, but there's also this gnawing fear that we are missing something important.

I was 14 or so when the wife of one of my father's co-workers hamhandedly approached me during a corporate retreat. Maybe she was just goofing around; certainly she was drunk. But I remember almost nothing of what she said nor how she said it. 

We were at the Blockade Runner hotel in Wrightsville Beach. I sat on a bench at the end of a long, wooden pier, fishing. The sea was calm. It was after some sort of outdoor dinner. Maybe a cookout. It was dark, very dark.

Most of the adults were far from me, at the base of the pier. But she walked out a bit ahead of them, toward me at the pier, and sat uncomfortably close to me on the plank bench I was fishing from. Might have had red hair, but that could have just been how the light made it look.

She sat close. She smelled like liquor. It was the first time I remember feeling a woman's breath.

The rest of the adults soon caught up to her and pulled her away and took her to the hotel. I was embarrassed.

But I wish I could remember what she said. Or what the adults said when they coaxed her away. Or what I had said, or thought, or what the fish smelled like, even.

I suppose I could always take a guess and say they smelled fishy.