Warning sign.

It wasn't until quite late in life that I realized the name Southern Bell was a pun. It also took me a long time to learn Thanksgiving was always on a Thursday.

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.

Repetition.

Eighth-grade history, which they called Social Studies, was held in a biology lab. 

Rather than sitting at desks in rows, we sat at lab tables, two students each. Mike sat to my left and shared a table with me. He took photographs for the yearbook.

Travis sat behind me. Let me preface this: I do not, as a rule, enjoy the company of people named Travis.  I do not recall if eighth-grade Travis (though by repute he had held that status for more than one year) was my first horrible Travis or just a memorable one.

But Travis he was. He wore a denim jacket and black jeans and a band T-shirt. Probably the Stones or Zeppelin or something classic-rocky because that's what Travises wore then.

And in class, he sat behind me. He didn't pay much attention to class. And he would, pretty regularly, lean forward and whisper into my ear:

"Pussy. Puuuuuuuuuuussy," he drew it out, in a long, country accent. "Pussy."

It was meant to be intimidating. And it did intimidate me. But Mike told his friends about it, and they told others, and it began to be this self-propogating in-joke of people walking up to me:

"Puuuuuuuuussy. Pussy."

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.