Remember When...

I got to Skype with Snickers for a delicious half hour this evening.

Snickers is one of my oldest friends. Not age-wise (she's fabulously thirty), but longevity-wise. She was one of the first people I met in college, and we lived together my sophomore year. In an apartment with six other girls. And two bathrooms. It was a year of Massive Inconvenience, but also fun in the way that "only when you're 19" is it fun to live with seven roommates in a cramped apartment. There was always something going on. Then again, there was always something going on.

Snickers migrated to San Francisco after circling the US for a few years (and the globe for a six month stint), which means that San Fran is now holding two of my most favorite people (Snap and Snickers) hostage. Which means, I suppose, that at some point I'll have to go and visit. Most likely, this is looking to be next year when Snickers gets married.

It was with a bit of sobriety that we realized we're coming up on the ten-year anniversary of September 11. It occurred the year we lived together, and we, along with our six other roommates, sat glued to the TV all day with friends and significant others crowded around us.

We transitioned to raucous laughter that I produced some pictures of us from college. It's amazing how much changes in ten years, especially when it comes to fashion.

"What are you wearing? Oh my God, it's that dress I made for costuming class. That thing was horrible."

"It wasn't that bad! It was...all asymmetrical, and...kind of like a towel. Or...a shower curtain. More like a shower curtain."

"Well here, you appear to be wearing..."

"...a terry-cloth strapless top."

"It's very fashion-y. This is also when you had the crazy stripes in your hair."

"OH and we both had eyebrow rings!"

"Very fashion-y."

"Very."

It's true. Snickers and I went down to the boardwalk one random September day and demanded that a grossly under-qualified teenager stick needles in our faces. Snickers was late to her psychology class that afternoon, and my mother blew a gasket when she found out about my new piercing. At Christmas that year when I was home, I fell asleep on the couch and woke up with an ornament jauntily hanging off of my eyebrow ring. I took it out shortly thereafter.

In recent years, Snickers and I, and our other friend, Princess, began emailing back and forth. It began when all three of us were inching out of weird situations we had found ourselves in, and just sort of never stopped. None of us had lost contact after college, but something about those emails roped us all in together and we're closer now, possibly, then we've been since we lived together ten years ago. The emails come nearly every day and are an endless source of laughter, support, and a sounding board for whatever we have going on in our lives.

I'm not sure if there's anything better than corresponding with someone who's known you for a long time. Who has seen you at your best--and worst--and still loves you and still thinks you're the bee's knees and worthy of all the great stuff life has to offer. And in whom you've seen so much change and yet still, somehow, the same core person she was when you first became friends so many years ago.

And, although it's relegated to Skype and email (Princess is in St. Louis these days), it's nearly the same as those weekly late-night drives to TCBY we took in college when we needed to get out of our rooms and into the night. Thankfully, Princess always had a car.

And, you know, it's great to be reminded of how fashion-y you were back then. Even while wearing a shower curtain. With asymmetrical hemlines.

The "Thursday Night" Of Your Life

"The path to enlightenment is not a path at all- it's actually a metaphor for the time it takes for you to allow yourself to be happy with who you already are, where you're already at, and what you already have-no matter what."

I was on my undergraduate campus this past weekend, in town to see a play in the theater where I spent four years of my life rehearsing, building sets, sewing costumes, arguing, auditioning, defending, creating, acting, stretching, feeling, and engaging in one epic game of hide-and-go-seek. I walked past the dorms where I'd lived, the buildings where I'd attended classes each day, the Commons where I'd eaten all of my meals. This place, now populated by strangers and changing all the time, was home to me at one point.

Mostly what I felt, underneath all of the nostalgia and remembrance, was a pretty solid happiness that I am not twenty years old anymore.

We all did a lot of growing up in college, and some of us faced further growing up outside of it. Some of us are still in the thick of it. Some are never out of it. The things that I know now...well, there's no use postulating how anything could have been different were you to have been gifted with knowledge and foresight at the time. It was fun, awkward, hilarious, and often painful. It was everything it needed to be.

Standing in a place where one has stood countless times before and coming to it with fresh perspective and advanced knowledge always brings about the hovering question of what sorts of wisdom and understanding you'll someday bring to the table if you should chance to visit the places you frequent now. Imagining myself as a college freshman, ten years ago, and then imagining viewing my life as it currently is, ten years from now, does offer some pretty stultifying perspective in terms of what's important and what isn't.

And mostly what I wish I could have leaned over and whispered to myself all those years was this: It. Gets. Better. In every way. The challenges are new, the pain is deeper, the losses bigger, but monumentally life just gets better as it goes on. Especially when you're comparing the late teens/early twenties to the onset of thirty. My God. How I would never want to be 19 again. Honestly.

Which made me think, randomly, in this fashion: what is the best night of the week?

Normally, everyone says "Friday" or "Saturday." Some really energetic person might throw a "Sunday" out there, just to throw everyone off the game.

But the answer, at least in my mind, is Thursday. All of the really good stuff, Friday night, the weekend, an end in sight, etc. is still yet to come. There's still work ahead of you, for sure. But it's work you don't mind doing - this Friday work - because the end is so close you can taste it. Thursday nights have all of the relaxation of a weekend night, but on more dialed-down terms. It has anticipation. It's when you know the best is still yet to come, and you've come so far already.

Which got me thinking...I'm in the Thursday night of my life.

(This is all a truly meandering train of thought, I know, but this is where my mind goes when I'm doing things like writing all the time and running. Your brain just starts clicking in weird ways. Bear with it. Or...enjoy it. Who knows? I like to think it's some logical stretch but sometimes I say these things out loud and once they hit air, I find myself being gaped at with blank stares. Perhaps some things should just reside in my head.)

But, really. Thursday night. Work still yet to be done, but really good stuff ahead. Starting to put all of these lessons learned and experience gained into some kind of real-world context. I see my friends going through this, when all of the bullshit of their first terrible jobs, and their many terrible failed romantic encounters, and the cheap shoes and bad dates and sketchy decisions; all of that just sorts to fall away, and what takes its place is the fulfilling career, the hard work that feels more fruitful in the doing, the real relationships, the more solid decisions.

This is not, in any way, to say that mistakes don't still happen or things don't still fall apart. It's not to say that life becomes perfect after a certain age. I just see how the anxieties and uncertainties and things that fall through tend to fade away in time. And what takes its place is a calmer, more genuinely stable outlook and feeling. Confidence, perhaps, might be a way of looking at it. A belief that things will turn out the way that they should, eventually, and a faith and trust that everything that is happening is unfolding just as it should. A genuine belief that answers reveal themselves in time. Not a constant, panicked worry that because things aren't working out according to plan, total devastation is the only terrain left.

I guess that's the sweetest part of the whole deal. You get older and start to understand that what feels like complete and utter failure at the time, in retrospect turns out to be some bullet dodged or lesson learned that came in sweet handy at another juncture. You start to see how what feels like a missed opportunity maybe wasn't the best option, that wrong turns sometimes lead to the opening of very right doors, and that all of the twisting and turning was configuring you into something better and more satisfying. Perhaps that's an idealistic, optimistic way of looking at things. And, to be fair, there are some things that have happened in my life purely, I believe, to be fodder for some memoir later on down the road when I have twenty five years of distance from it. But, for the most part, I've seen more and more that things almost universally turn out the way they are supposed to, no matter how wrong or right it's felt at the time.

Maybe Thursday night is the anticipation that, regardless of what happens, this is the magic moment when you believe the best. When the experiences are still phantoms and hopeful ghosts and not yet concrete things that could be weighted with disappointment. There is no disappointment in anticipation.

Mostly, it's just a general appreciation for all that's happened and an excited anticipation of all that is yet to be. That's the Thursday night. That's the "Thursday Night" of your life.

Or maybe I just need to start keeping my thoughts confined to notebooks that don't see the light of day. It is possible I am simply becoming eccentric and slightly insane in my old age.

Children

We were such children, then. Even more so than we are now.
We sat on a bench in the courtyard next to a dorm where only juniors and seniors lived, and we felt important. As though our very proximity to maturity would somehow elicit understanding and unlock answers.
We were drinking Zima then. That or Boone's Farm. Whatever we could con an upperclassmen into buying for us from the gas station out on Route 13. We dropped candy into our bottles; Skittles, Jolly Ranchers, anything that would turn the liquid some obnoxiously bright color and leave our tongues stained with red, purple, or green. At the end of each bottle, the lump of melted candy would rattle around if it hadn't dissipated altogether. It never occurred to us to wonder that whatever chemical reaction was taking place between the malt liqour and the candy might be having a similar effect on us.
The end of her cigarette left light trails in the air like fireflies. I can't remember specifically what we were talking about, only that it felt terribly important at the time and that I would have told her anything. After a few years, we would get into an argument over something one of us thought the other had said and never speak again. We didn't know enough then to know that some friendships are transitory; that not every person with whom you find a connection in college will be in your life forever. At the time, we were still fixated on ensuring that these were the best moments of our lives and, as such, that we were somehow forging lifelong bonds and connections.
I remember now- we were discussing whether or not she should break up with her boyfriend who went to a different school. It was still in the first semester of freshman year, when we thought long-distance relationships were possible. They'd been high school sweethearts. Life still seemed so small but, day by day, we were cracking it open further and further and discovering that the depths and heights were unfathomable. High school boyfriends didn't fit into this ever-expanding world.
We were sitting close enough between the dorms that she had her portable telephone in her lap, waiting for him to call. Through experimentation, we'd discovered that this bench was still close enough to her open window that she could get reception. This was in the days before cell phones, when proximity to a landline was still a vital cog in the social machinery. Especially for long-distance college relationships.
If we sat on this bench, we were halfway between her room and the upperclass dorm. Still within telephone distance of her high school sweetheart but close enough to the future to be straddling both worlds.
It was still warm then, early fall, and humid. It was always humid because the ocean thumped less than thirty miles away and, on the other side of the things, the vast bay created a pocket of moisture-laden air that settled over our small college town and never seemed to dissapate. Our skin felt cool and damp, the bottles chilling our hands, the smoke from her cigarette hanging in the last of the summer swelter in the dark of the evening.
Everything seemed so important. The bricks, the wood of the bench, the shoes I was wearing. Everything seemed vital and necessary.
"Should I break up with him?" she asked. It was a rhetorical question. She wouldn't. And then, one day, years later, she would. And, in the process, discover a pull to women. But, for the time being, it was the most important matter on our plates, and we attacked the problem with a vengeance. We sat on the bench, determined to hammer it out, drinking our way through the six pack of cheap malt liquor and shaking our heads as though this problem hefted with it the weight of the world.

The Parking Cone

For Mochi, who is inspiration herself, and for Catalano, who needs something to read on her lunch break. Based on events of the summer of 2009, and various other occurrences between 2002 and 2004.

I stood in my kitchen, mug of coffee in hand, and surveyed the situation disdainfully. It was staring back at me, equally judgmental and full of spite. We were caught in this staring match, it and me, and it was fairly clear who would claim victory.

A parking cone had, somehow, appeared in my kitchen on the morning after a night out.

Now, let me be the first to say that although I certainly have my moments, I am not wont to participate in illegal activities. Stolen government property being, of course, up there with public nudity and other terrifically stupid acts. I am a person who is polite to officers of the law, almost to the point of ass-kissing. I follow directions and rules.

I do, from time to time, get a dangerous thrilling rush from jaywalking. But this is neither here nor there.

What was there was a damn parking cone. A bright orange, slightly dirty rubber traffic cone mocking me mercilessly from where it perched, in a droll fashion, next to the bottom step just off the kitchen. I had questions and I wanted answers. I mentally scrolled through the events of the previous night (aside: isn't it interesting how computer lingo works its way into our vernacular creating a very apt description of flipping through memories like Poloroids) and nowhere in between the karaoke and Buckhunter existed a memory of a traffic cone inserting itself into my life again.

Again.

In the fall of 2002, I rented an off-campus house with two friends. We would later wind up all hating one another and never speaking again for various reasons, but in the beginning it was all shared booze and Nintendo at two am. We had cute neighbors, a gang of boys who brought over six packs of beer and once took two of us minigolfing in Ocean City on a very awkward "date" of sorts. We were twenty and living off-campus for the first time. I was white-blonde then, and recently returned from a summer abroad in Germany, Italy, Austria, Switzerland. I was eating Nutella out of the jar, discussing world politics, and thought I was better than everyone else. This could have been part of the reason why we all ended up hating one another; I have no doubt I was insufferable.

The neighbors flirted with us in ways only college boys can flirt. They mooned us out of their living room windows, pelted us with snowballs in winter, stole our trash can lids, and wrote dirty items on the grocery list taped to the refrigerator. There was never any intention of any of us dating one another, although there was a brief scandal when one roommate had a few sleepovers with one of them, but that ended as abruptly and awkwardly as it started. It was simply the pure thrill of a houseful of girls living catty corner from a houseful of guys and copious amounts of free time spent dreaming up ways to catch each other's attention.

And one day, the parking cone appeared.

I never knew who found it, or from whence it came, but one morning a parking cone appeared in the boys' living room. A trophy dragged home after a night of SoCo and lime shots, no doubt. One of those "hilarious-at-the-time" moments that, the morning after, no one can precisely remember. The evidence exists and, no doubt someone thought it was a good idea at the time.

And then the parking cone decided to move in with us.

At first, it moved to our driveway. I came home from class one day to find my parking space reserved for a Mr. Cone. There it sat, tapered and somehow elegant in the scrubby grass. I don't know what it is about a three-foot tower of orange rubber that is so stultifying. My car could easily have rolled right up and over it, but societal norms and scrupulous studying for my driver's license only four years prior prevented me from even attempting such a thing. With all of my prior social training intact, I got out of the car and carefully moved the offending cone out of my space. And there it camped, on the edge of the lot of grass designated for parking.

The cone stood fast. In the mornings, it glistened with dew. When it rained, mud from the car tires splattered it. One morning I came out to go to class and discovered that it sparkled with frost. It became as much a part of the scenery as the naked, skinny tree that leaned up against the side of the house, and the rusted clothes line pole with ancient bits of unexplained string hanging off of it. Like most other college kids living in our particular neighborhood, sharing sidewalks with the poorer citizens of a small town on the Eastern shore, we had a landlord who existed on paper and who had a mailbox somewhere for our rent checks but was primarily absent. The parking cone, after a time, became unnoticed.

Until it decided to approach us.

We woke up one morning to find that the parking cone had become aggressive. It had approached the house, without permission, and was now staging a sit-in on the front stoop. Like some representative of a religious organization, it remained at our front door in a sort of hold-out. In reality, of course, the boys had simply picked it up and transitioned it to a more obvious locale. But it almost felt as though the parking cone itself was making a bold move. As if it got tired of being ignored in the driveway and decided to invite itself in for tea.

But the parking cone, however aggressive, was somewhat lacking in strategic planning because our house was laid out like every other squat, square home in the neighborhood and therefore possessed a second side door into the kitchen that, like every other home in the neighborhood, was used as the primary entrance/exit. I think the only time we even opened the front door in the year that we lived in that house was to retrieve the mail and, even then, it wasn't uncommon to walk around the front of the house from the driveway in back to do so.

So, the parking cone sat on our front stoop for another uncertain period of time. And, after awhile, in the wake of never opening the front door, we forgot about it entirely.

Until it moved in.

In a final offensive act of affrontery, the parking cone somehow made it's way inside after a particularly rowdy party (the same party that also resulted in a semi-permanant sheen of sticky, sugary red detritus on the kitchen floor from an ill-conceived cooler of Jungle Juice.) I came into the kitchen one morning and there it was in the living room amidst the beer cans and wine bottles and empty pizza boxes. It might as well have been wearing a party hat. I'm almost certain it was hungover.

We would later discover that the parking cone had been transferred from the long-forgotten front-stoop to this location by one of the residents of the boys' house, an impressively large, gentle giant known as much for being a bouncer at one of the local college bars as for his motorcycle on which he tore down Route 13. Later that spring, in an act so swift and still, seven years later, inexplicable he would put a gun to his head and leave behind a bereft community and three roommates who would never be the same. I believe that the reason the parking cone took up permanant residence in our living room after that had much to do with memorializing the sense of humor that would place a piece of stolen government property next to our DVD rack and under the permanantly-lit Christmas lights. We were twenty years old and suicides didn't fit in with drunk pranks. None of us knew what to say about it.

When I moved out of that house in May of 2003, the parking cone was still in residence in the living room. I left behind a lot of bad terms, screamed insults, a broken coffee maker and the parking cone. I don't know what the other roommates did with it, but I'll wager a guess that the cone either became a part of the lease for the next generation of college students who moved in to use and abuse the house, or that it was demoted to the driveway again.

Over the years there were other things that followed us home after drunken nights out. One of my roommates my senior year of college had a particularly nasty klepto habit that emerged after some undetermined amount of liquor and, as such, we had a fantastic collection of bar signs and ware ranging from sandwich boards to signs to salt and pepper shakers to a bar stool that would later come with us when she moved to Florida with me. Government property, in all its utilitarianism, somehow lost its appeal for us that year. We had moved on to greater trophies: things we could actually use. And somehow, deep in our collective drunk unconscious, I think we understood that dealing with an irate bartender was vastly preferable to the concept of being accosted by a representative of the law. The incident of the exit sign, stolen off of a dorm wall, notwithstanding.

In later years, drunken detritus ebbed and flowed. Somewhere in my mid-twenties, the act of swiping items lost its appeal completely. Mostly because whatever seemed like a good idea at the time more often wound up creating clutter in the house that I just didn't know how to purge. And also because my evening bags got progressively smaller, my drinks stronger but fewer, and my general sense of fun leaning more towards convivial conversation than pranks or destructive acts.

Which is why, standing there in my kitchen with my morning mug of coffee steaming and my head frantically ticking, I could not for the life of me figure out why I would have brought home a traffic cone. It was inexplicable, inconceivable, and something so entirely out of my current character that I was becoming angry with myself. How could I have done such a thing? This was my past, this was a parenthetical period of bad behavior coupled with small-town college boredom. This wasn't my grown-up life, this wasn't interesting, and it wasn't funny. I sipped my coffee and felt a surge of self-loathing.

This was short-lived, however. A moment later, Whack stumbled down the stairs, head in one hand, and breezed past me towards the back door to let the dog out.

"I'm sorry about the cone. I'll get rid of it, I promise," she said. "I don't know what possessed me to do that."

The parking cone was gone the next day, replaced very carefully in the exact location from whence it was taken.