I think this craigslist chick may be gonna stand me up.

[fflo]

She was supposedly maybe gonna buy this old bar stool I put on there. She's late.

So it's Friday evening, and it's gorgeous out. Cloudy & ---what, let's look... 57 degrees F. Nice. I have the sliding glass door open, but still have storms on all the windows. The light's waning quick. Rumor is rain all weekend. Internet seems to have heard the rumor.

This was a weird week for me. Hard. Can't say as I liked it much, overall. One surreal element I did kind of like is that my brother, of all things, put me in touch with the girl who used to live across the street from us when we were kids in Kansas. She was definitely my best buddy, if I had one. Jenny. (It was the two crew-cut boys next door, from Texas, that I played doctor with, but that wasn't much of a bond.) (They called their parents "ma'am" and "sir," which seemed pretty weird to me at the time.)

Jenny's mom seemed like some way-cool hippie type---wonder if she was. I had my first sleepover at Jenny's. Just me and her. I remember that only cuz I woke up in the middle of the night, got up, and went home, and they couldn't find me in the morning until somebody thought to look in my bed, and then the story got told, as those stories do. I guess that was one in which I didn't hate my characterization, even if it turned on my being assumed to have been scared.

I'm happy to find out that Jenny ("Jen" now) (and probably for 30 years) isn't some arch right-winger. She's a Doctor of Pharmacy, working on multiple sclerosis, and living on a farm outside KCMO with a husband and a whole buncha animals. She has 2 grown-up kids. Is Unitarian. And a Democrat. Both of those are pretty lefty things to be when you grow up in the Little Apple.

Robbie found her while doing the social networking version of something he did in person some years ago: checking up on the people who would have been in his class (and mine) if we had stayed in Manhattan. When he was out there a while ago he went to the library & got the high school yearbooks out & looked up people. His message to me about it then gave me the impression that he has an idea things would have been very different, and very much better, if we'd not moved to Maryland.

Hey, there's a duck in the road. Hi, duck.

I don't know what I think about Robbie's maybe idea. Mostly I've thought what it might mean for him if that's how he thinks about it. Seems like a strange thing to carry around from age 12, but I guess we've pretty much all got our things like that, or have had 'em. And maybe he hasn't carried it around the whole time, but took it up later.

He generally talks about how very little he remembers of our childhoods. I thought I barely remembered anything, especially from Kansas, but I seem to be able to call up more than he.

The funny thing about Jenny is that I just the other day came across a school picture of hers; it's sitting on a speaker in the living room right now. It was her picture from 8th grade, 4 years after I left her. I had no recollection that we'd kept in any kind of touch that long. On the back she apologizes for being ugly. Was she ugly? No. Not by any stretch of the imagination. And she's got loads of cutie energy in her pictures now.

I remember her only fondly.

Duck's gone. No craigslist woman. Dark out. Guess it's time to get on the horn and try to play a little credit card roulette, maybe rustle up some supper.

I'd say I'm glad the week's over, but it doesn't feel like it is. I'm just not going to work tomorrow. And there's something about changing the clocks. Did ya'll know that? It's that time.

I'll be needing a new default icon.

Comments

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

life would have been better in what way? also, what is the evidence for this revisionism?

[fflo.livejournal.com]

in lotsa ways? in all ways? anyway, does it count as revisionism if you're rewriting what never happened? ya'll literary types probably have the "looking back on the thing that never was in the future but at one point may have been", uh, thing down. it's probably kinda like explaining future perfect to somebody.

i always liked to use a "by the time ..." structure.

by the time my mother comes to visit, i would suggest, i will have already _____ed.

i reckoned at 23 that that one was nigh on universal.

but if you're asking what evidence i have of his having such an idea, it was mostly from the old email in which he told me of the research. can't remember what he said exactly at the moment. it was probably more overt than i'm making it sound.

i'm having a hard time with meaning these days. makes me feel hedgey and a little frightened.

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

i was just wondering what the standards of good life were and the ways in which this life "fails" to meet them, and what the other life would have had that this one doesn't.

i'm suspecting one aspect of it might be just the disruption, in which i am always ready to see a source of great mind-swirling (mine never stopped:). can't stop thinking about what x would have been if you didn't change the circumstances. in my case, on the arrival end of it, it is propelled by the sense that nothing ever worked out the way i imagined. on the 'home' end, i get seeing what some of it has turn into, so it helps to a degree.

i wonder what he found out about those people that made him think he would have done 'better' if he had been allowed to stay.

future perfect: a complete mystery to most speakers of the language of my peoples. can't wrap their minds around it--the "will have" (future in the past) makes no sense at all.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

future perfect really is an imaginary thing, isn't it? like regret, except what will have happened (or not) hasn't yet, in the imagining eye. casting forward, i suppose, doesn't have the element (that casting backward does) of what *surely will never have been, because in casting backward we're already at the point from which the assessing is going on, and that ship done sailed, sisters and brothers.

i have the fodder for plenty of speculation about what the guy might figure went wrong after the move, and thus was bad enough to have maybe been better if not. boy, do i. that's kind of the crux, to me. like: look-- robbie seems to have this core thing. the "mighta" parts are so much pie in the sky.

i suppose it's my speculation that what went wrong woulda gone wrong anyway, probably, or maybe gone wrong somewhat otherwise, but not not.

you know, a year after we moved, the family of one of my father's colleagues at k-state followed us, as their father joined the faculty my father had moved to be among. their daughter lisa, who was my age, joined me at my school. in 5th grade i hadn't talked terribly much of my life in kansas, but when she arrived for 6th, all homesick, she spoke a lot of how much better things were there. much more cool. told all the kids about this great thing, that great thing. she processed the heck out of that transition, and in real time.

i was mostly puzzled.  "was it?"  "maybe it was!"  "my, this is puzzling."

she looked to me to join her with the "yeah, right!"s, and i believe i did, at least a little. she must have had some points to make. anyway it seemed cool, the way she was talking about it. i sure felt the contrast with my way of joining the fruitlanders.

the school was in fruitland. that's the name of the town. it's a great town name, isn't it?