Unload, August
I don’t have a good explanation for why I haven’t written in so long. I think I need to write shorter, more frequent posts to avoid falling into the trap of unmeetable expectations. (What zefrank calls brain crack.)
(Several distracted minutes watching zefrank clips later…)
This isn’t going to be as full (detailed? padded? descriptive?) as I’d like.
I started an entry in August to write about August 17th. August 17th marked twenty years since my family moved from Florida to Tennessee. For a long time, I considered that one of the pivotal events of my life.
For my 14th birthday the previous year, 1988, I’d received my first modem: a 1200-baud PLUS card for our Tandy 1000EX. That was the year I got into BBSes; there were several in my part of central Florida at the time. I met people, made friends. I joined a community more like me than any I’d previously known. I practically fit in.
That fall I picked up the nickname “Hippie Jim” due to my unfashionably long hair and fascination with “hippie culture.” I wore a lot of tie-dyes, a rolled-up bandanna around my head, and a serape my father had picked up in Mexico a decade earlier.
If I’d thought about it, I wouldn’t have expected 9th grade to be as tolerant as it actually was.
I took a year of high school Latin. My electives were photography and television productions. It was high-end humor when Bush defeated Dukakis that fall (hurr hurr hurr). I learned to bowl with my friends from The Adventurer’s Inn, the most-trafficked BBS in the area.
Met a girl towards the end of the school year; she was a senior, I think. Callie was four years older than me, and she was a goddess. Thin, with long, straight blond hair, and a smile that made me feel like I was going to get caught. She was smart and funny, and got me to read Interview With the Vampire. She had excellent canines.
She was the first girl I ever went out on a date with. June 23rd, 1989 — I can be specific, because that’s when Batman came out. Afterward, we loitered around a shopping center parking lot until 2am, talking.
She was my first kiss.
One night we found an old dirt road in the middle of nowhere and spent hours sitting on her car hood and watching fireflies.
Our last date was August 16th. We spent a lot of it at Lake Colby in Cassadaga, watching the lunar eclipse. It was the 20th anniversary of Woodstock. On her way to drop me off at home late that night, her car’s odometer passed 77,777.7.
It’s funny, because I was really into astronomy when I was younger. I remember being seven, and mom not letting me stay up past my bedtime to see the lunar eclipse in 1982. “Your book says there’s another one in seven years,” she told me, and I unsuccessfully argued that, while seven years may not be much to her, it was my whole life over again.
(This is how I’ve known it to have been for a long time — only now, double-checking my facts, do I note the 1982 eclipse was on December 30th, after I’d been eight for three months. Maybe I told mom that was almost my whole life over again.)
So, August 17th, 1989, we moved to Tennessee. The house wasn’t finished yet, so we spent four months living in the tack room of a barn in the middle of 200 acres. Spring-fed (unheated) shower, one television channel (PBS), two “rooms,” and an outhouse. No computer. No friends. No neighbors.
That was 20 years ago. Callie’s 39, now, married, and has a kid. I looked her up in early 2006 in that year when Sue and I were, well, holding our breath.
I had planned to write about that date being such an important one for me, and how this year it didn’t seem such a big deal. Writing it now, though, it feels.
I’ll do the rest of my catch-up later, I think, in smaller bits. That was August.