Author and Columnist
This entry is a little redundant coupled with the last one. I am not sure why you felt it was necessary to have both, except that it was content you could retrofit.
So, instead, let's talk about KC, the original recipient of this missive-turned-entry.
Even twenty years later, I recall how you adored her. Both of you were in other relationships and as content as people your age could be, but you thought she was spectacular, even before you met her properly. You noticed her, but this was an era before one could have searched her name and found a means of low-stakes contact. More's the better.
You approached her in Media Play, a music and movie store in the same mall where you worked at the Children's Museum. Possibly, you were on break and killing time before you were to return. (The South Hills Mall was a thousand feet from the Poughkeepsie Galleria, an objectively better mall that would eventually cause the South Hills to be bulldozed or turned into specialty shops. Even the cheap movie theater, delight of many nights, is no more, though it clung far longer than it had any right.)
You had seen KC in a couple of plays at her high school. She was the star of Once Upon a Mattress, which is what you used as an opener. She looked at you with the same glimmer and named a play in which she had seen you. You were mutually blushing at the other's high school theatrical experience, though you were always a bit part--as you should have been, given that you cannot sing or dance and could not ever get cast in any plays that didn't require it. She was above-the-title, as she, too, should have been. She sang well, she had a balletic understanding of the area her body occupied, and exuded a presence that drew the eye even off the stage.
I imagine that few things flattered you more than KC knowing who you were that day, that you struck her enough for her to have carried your face in her mind.
This, in my era, is called a meet-cute. You were good at these. That was among your charms.
(You were oddly well known for being, shall we say, gregarious with a swath of the female population of several schools. I still don't quite know how you managed that. Unbridled confidence and a sense of humor got you far, it appears.)
KC reflected or formed much of what you found attractive going forward: awkwardly pretty, lithe and slight, brilliant, goofy, talkative. You will someday have a girlfriend--one of the most important--who will peg your predilection for slight overbites, which you might not have had before you met KC, but I couldn't swear to it.
(Your wife will one day exceed this adolescent template, don't you fret.)
Nothing happened between KC and you beyond a lot of long conversations that feel deep in retrospect, though only because I have no idea what you talked about. I cannot even promise that the two of you spent time together in the flesh, though I'd like to have that memory if it existed.
It may have possibly been that the extent of your friendship with her was telephone calls and a few emails, but you considered her close friend. If this was reciprocated is uncertain. For whatever part of your life at the time she occupied, you may not have loomed as large.
Last I checked, she was a symphony cellist and lived in France with her husband and children. In what little evidence was cursorily available, KC was surrounded by a supportive Gallic crew. She has not done poorly for herself. You have not spoken to her in what is likely twenty years, but you probably think about her every three months and are glad you got to know some iteration of her, if only for a little while.
Katie is coming to watch my rehearsal tomorrow. And, not to be crude, if we don't fool around, I am positively going to explode.
Oh, dear boy, if only I could tamp down your understandable teenage overemphasis on sex, your relationship with Kate would have been easier. Sex is fun--it is why our species is so profligate--but I remember you being a pest about it.
No one owes you anything sexual, buddy, not even in a mutually monogamous romantic relationship. You are young, I know, and full of surging hormones, but Kate needed a softer touch. You likely would have had a better experience if you could have emphasized sex less.
(This is not to suggest a teenager girl's libido is anything subtle, but your own was screaming a litany so that you may have missed moments where it could have been a better duet.)
Also? Don't talk to KC (or KC types) about sexual explosions. What were you thinking?
My mom is pretty much over her friend's death.
No, she wasn't. I don't think you believed this even then, so I am confused about why you told KC this.
You had not experienced the death of a friend at this point and won't for another two years. (We will get there.) Death lingers in small details. You will hear the last few notes of a song and your brain will remind you, all at once, about them. Decades later, you will think of them and be angry or sad, but you will not be over it. Ever death takes something from you, leaving behind regrets of what you could have said or done differently. You heal, but it is always there, waiting to remind you.
All of her friend's ex-lovers stood up and told (in graphic detail) about their relationship with Ellen, right in front of their present lovers.
That can't have been easy for anyone, but you must admit that it would be a little funny to watch in a movie.
The significance of the buffalo was that she wanted Ellen to be a strong as a bull and eventually it became a buffalo. I don't remember how. The weeping cherry tree doesn't have much significance. I think my mother just felt that was a sweet way to remember her. Of course, now she refers to the tree as Ellen, but in a non-psychotic way.
Ah, I assumed it had to be something like that. See, I said that I wouldn't read ahead. Proof.
I'm being forced to go to Dutchess. I don't want to, understand. I wanted to go to New Paltz (and not just because all my friends are going there). But my parents wouldn't listen. They knew DCC gave me a full ride, so I was not allowed to argue.
And this will be one of the biggest turning points in your life, something that you will reflect on and point at to explain how you got where you are. Vassar scouted you, but they couldn't give you the sort of financial aid that would have done anything but put you into lifelong debt. (Though one can't say for certain what else might have changed. You might have married the daughter of a moneyed philanthropist and never had to gestate another financial worry in your life. My money, as it were is penury and a degree no more useful than the one with which you do graduate before getting your master's.)
Going to Dutchess makes you feel less-than. Watching your friends immersed in dorm life when you returned to your parents' home every evening (that you did not spend in or near your friends' beds) made you feel stunted and cheated for far longer than was psychologically healthy.
A full scholarship is a full scholarship, even if it is to a community college, and you should have worn this as a badge of pride. Instead, you thought about this life you thought you were owed in a Vassar dorm.
Also? You definitely wanted to go to New Paltz mostly because that is where your friends (Kate and Alison) were going. If Vassar had ponied up financial aid, you would have not mentioned New Paltz ever again and been insufferable about it.
