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.

Fear.

In my twenties, I had a small circle of friends. We weren't adventurous. Most of our evenings were spent at one another's homes, watching television and drinking beers. We were inexperienced, safe, privileged kids fresh out of good schools.

Lea was different. She had grown up poor. She was sexually adventurous where the rest of us were not. She laughed too loud and did not take care of her hair or teeth. On nights when the rest of our group would stay home, she would go to roadhouses and sports bars. The others of us spoke patronizingly about her choices and brainstormed ways to get her to leave that life.

At the time, I felt I was protecting her by worrying about danger from men. But  I really was terrified she was having a good time; scared that at any moment that she was enjoying sex.

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.

Smoking.

This piece was originally published on my old website.

Lissa liked Kundera and E.M. Forster. “Only connect.”

About a month into her first year in the dorm for transfer students, a bunch of us went to a neighborhood bar.

She talked about the years she was a nanny to a rich Chicagoan and about how she’d had to sit in the bathroom for an entire flight on his private jet. She had carried a basketball signed by Michael Jordan on her lap, in the bathroom, because there hadn’t been a seat for her.

I had smoked one cigarette before that night, one swiped from my grandmother’s brown vinyl cigarette case when I was 11. It had made me nauseated.

Lissa smoked socially, she said, which was something I had never heard of. I figured I could smoke socially. With beer, smoking was fantastic and I kind of fell into a crush with Lissa.

I drank a lot of beer that night, and she flirted with some other guy, and within a few months I sort of eventually figured out that I was never going to get anywhere with Lissa, mostly because I was awkward and unworldly.

But I smoked pretty much nonstop for 10 years.