Swan.

Virtually every time I went to the Art Institute of Chicago, I spent a few minutes looking at Leda and its simple, swelling lines.

In 1994, Lissa and I went with Adam, a towheaded, broadshouldered aspiring filmmaker, to the opening night of "Pulp Fiction."

I still was interested in Lissa, and I asked what her favorite piece was in the Art Institute. 

"Leda," she said, as we drove over a vertiginous bump on Lake Shore Drive that sometimes made my stomach sink.

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.

Thighs.

I've been fat forever. Only once have I ever lost a significant amount of weight.

I wanted to know what it was like to be desired, to be looked at for more than the half second it takes to see a fat person. So I ate a bowl of shredded wheat each day. I ran about 3 miles a day in the Chicago winter. I lost about 55 pounds in a month and a half or so, maybe two.

It provoked an attack of kidney stones that sent me to the hospital. I put the weight back on within eight months.

I really don't have any memory of people looking at me differently, but I remember being able to run my hands up my thighs and think: These are not offensive.

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.