quote:I can barely remember many of my classmates names, much less all the details of their personalities like you are able to relate
Farmgirl, I know! I can acutally remember many of my classmates' faces and personalities, but I doubt I could come up with many of their names. And remembering which classes I had during which periods? Forget it.
::suspicious::
Olivet, are you looking at old school schedules and yearbooks to come up with some of the details, or is all of this really that fresh in your mind?
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posted
Well, I HAD an eidetic memory, and it was a bitch. I have worked long and hard at forgeting some things, and putting order to most of the rest.
However, I'm older now, and whether it is related to the meningitis I had a few years ago (let's hear it for microbes!) or just because my brain finally reached capacity, my memory is not so eidetic anymore.
This stuff from High school... most of it is still there, I just have to dig it out. If I can't locate a detail for certain, I leave it out.
My brain is like a room full of slips of paper. Each piece of paper has some bit of memory on it, but none of them are filed. I can remember a conversation from my Junior year word for word, but I have to really dig to be able to say for certain it was my Junior year (from clues in the memory).
I admit I may have put something in the wrong place on the timeline, but I've been very careful to be honest about what I remember. Writing this won't help me at all if I lie.
Truth is, I'm beating myself up to pare it down. I wanted to go into detail about, say, Ricky Mathes (he used to sign all his designs "McColl" and was gay but used to tell me he'd marry if he could see himself with 2.5 kids and a station wagon). We were like best art buddies, but this isn't his story.
I'm very distractable. *shrug* So this will be way longer than it really needs to be.
But I'm not fudging the details, and I haven't looked at my yearbooks (don't know where they are), though I had thought about scanning pictures of them, if I could find them.
Anyway, I DID tell you I was a freak, or at least freakish. I didn't lie. I haven't been completely forthcoming about my memory issues, because I still feel like they are some strange, twisted part of my past that I should hide. I truly meant never to speak of it again, once upon a time.
It was all part of my plan in Senior year for after the surgery - I was going to be normal. I was going to fool everybody, and just be a regular girl. By the time I hit college, I knew I'd be free of any lingering image issues from High School.
It was all very cold, detatched and calculating, something I had become quite good at in Christian School. I made sure no one ever knew what I was really thinking, sometimes not even me.
posted
Thanks for sharing your landmark with us Olivet. Is the "In Stages" deliberate or a Freudian type slip?
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A word about autobiographies, though... We discussed the memory problem at great length last year in my autobiography class. You never really can remember something exactly--you have to fill in the details. And really, how do you know if you're remembering what you do remember correctly? Someone else will probably have a very different version. Many times, autobiographers have to deal with readers coming up to them later and being shocked that yes, some of the story was invented. And that's okay. It's part of what autobiography is. It can be true at large with those small invented details filling in the memory gaps.
posted
I know you said in another thread that you were thinking of deleting this, or at least not writing more, and that's completely within your rights, but you can't leave us hanging on why he smelled like pennies!
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posted
She's had an operation and her peepers are outta commish for the time being, if memory serves.
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quote:Feel no shame for what you are – New Year’s Prayer, Jeff Buckley
I honestly thought about not finishing this. I had never intended to let that bit of information about mnemonic history get out here. Very few of my RL friends know about it, and I suppose it doesn’t really matter now. I was told that sometimes this type of thing fades with age, as it seems to be doing in my case. I’m glad.
Katarain is right, though. There is no such thing as a flawless memory, and mine was no different. It isn’t like a video tape – things are colored by emotion and affected by it. As a matter of fact, there have been times I have been so upset that I couldn’t tell someone my name when they asked. I was so upset I couldn’t remember. That was the most horrific realization I ever had (before the age of twenty, anyway), that it could all be gone when I might need it the most. Just … Blip… Gone.
I was sent to see a child psychologist when I had behavioral problems in second grade. Mostly for fighting, or, more accurately, fighting BACK. Maybe that’s why I loved Ender so well. In any case, he said I was very precocious and wanted to test me. I think I became part of some study or other after the testing. My dad was till in the Military and so the Child Psych was a civilian employee of the government. Military families get a deal on healthcare (or at least they DID then). I got to be a guinea pig. Once I was old enough to realize the difference between clinical interest and caring, I began yanking their chains. They’d show me a picture for 15 seconds (usually a library, with lots of books where you could read the titles, things like that) and ask me to describe it. By the time I was nine or ten, I started saying, “A monkey in tutu, eating a banana.” Heh. I didn’t get asked back.
When my parents divorced, my mom sent me to counseling. Yeah, I was bummed, but not about the divorce. I was pretty much universally despised at Christian school. I had only just learned (at about age 13) how to manage my memory so I could find information I needed, when I needed it. I was in 7th grade before I ever made straight As. I had never done badly, but with a modicum of effort, I became a top student. I was also very devout, and all the parents liked me. The kids hated me, but they knew their parents would let them go to the movies if *I* was going. We had an uncomfortable arrangement. The counseling went on until the young, health department counselor asked if she could test me, because I seemed so mature for my age.
They like to do that. They like to get your numbers down in front of them, as if that tells them the secrets of your soul. The problem is that it doesn’t tell them anything. I never went back. I put on the happy face so they wouldn’t make me go.
So, I’m a bit tetchy about the memory thing. I never intended to share that here, but once it was out… what the heck. Just so you know, I’m not upset at CT about it all. I don’t want anyone to misunderstand. I’m talking about it now because if I don’t, people will get the wrong idea. It’s not like the movies. It makes you weird. I remember when I first realized that the other kids didn’t remember things like I did. Not my siblings or my parents, either. It was a very, very bad feeling.
Of course, with all the past testing, my mom knew my numbers. She was proud of me, and also proud of my numbers. People would praise me to her, and ask about how I became such a good student. Did she do anything special? Mom would always say it was just me, all on my own, and then she’d mention my numbers. Not the IQ, even she thought that was gauche, but the percentage of accuracy of my memory (which never broke 90% and wasn’t really as a big a deal as she made of it). I would shoot her a look, or say, “Mom” in that way preteens have of giving small words about 20 extra syllables.
She never got it. She never understood that I hated it when she bragged about my numbers. It felt false. For all I know for certain, she could have made it up. They never told me those things. I never told her it made me feel like she was going around telling people I had three nipples, or gills under my arms. It was something she was proud of, and, as much as I hated it, I wanted her to be proud of me even more.
Anyway, there are three things I never, ever planned to reveal on Hatrack. That is one of them. It isn’t the strangest, but it is the most likely to be misunderstood. In any case, I’m sure my numbers are much lower now. I bet if I were tested now, I’d be below the Hatrack average, anyway. So let’s move on with the story.
When I went back to school after Christmas break and my surgery, a lot happened in a short time.
I spent the first month and a half with my jaws wired shut. I bought milk and mixed Carnation instant breakfast with it, about four times a day during school. I could sip, but I couldn’t use a straw. I could barely carry on a conversation in the lunchroom. It was too noisy for people to make out my mutterings. I had learned some sign language, but few others could speak it. Eventually, I carried a note pad around my neck on a chain.
We still had the prayer club meetings, but sometimes they were just Pondscum and me. One day, he generously offered to buy me anything I wanted out of the vending machines. When I protested, he insisted it was nothing. I finally had to write him a note, explaining that I appreciated the offer and would love to take him up on it, but I couldn’t eat anything in the vending machine because I couldn’t open my mouth. Pondscum was pretty, but not terribly schmart.
I had lost ten pounds I couldn’t afford to lose during the Christmas break, and I lost five more the week the wires were clipped. My jaw muscles had atrophied a bit, so I had to build up to eating some things, while I steadfastly refused to drink another drop of Ensure or Carnation instant breakfast.
It was about this time that I was working on two things for Advanced Art: my final project, and my one-woman show. The show consisted of a bunch of my drawings wheeled out into the lunchroom during all three lunches (but locked in the office at other times to prevent vandalism). My show went over well, as it consisted of a lot of faces and hands. I also did a bunch of super-close-ups of various features of a face. They varied in scale and so forth, and were not intended to suggest a whole when displayed.
A particular favorite of mine was a very large, wet-looking close-up of a crying eye that I had called “Compassion”. I know, I know. How very TEEN of me. *blush* Several people wanted to buy it from me, but I couldn’t part with it, nor could I afford to make prints. We didn’t have a lot of money. My Junior year I had been one of two nominees from our school to attend a “Youth Congress” in Washington DC, but we didn’t have $500.00 to spare for the trip, and we didn’t know enough people with enough spare cash to raise it. Besides, Ronnie would never have let me live it down.
There was a girl named Julie who was quickly becoming my best friend, though I have absolutely no memory of how we met (which I find odd, but there you go). She was also friends with a girl named Melanie, who was probably the single lowest person in the HS pecking order. She was very over weight, and never wore make-up or did anything with her hair, for religious reasons. She would wear a fuchsia t-shirt with foot-high letters on it reading REPENT NOW. She came back from band trips with stories of how she’d met angels. The other band kids tended to call her “Melephant”. Melanie thought of Julie as her best friend, and Julie thought of me as her best friend. I never really had many people I allowed to know me well enough to call them friends, because I was too busy trying to hide the things I thought made me an unlikable freak. But I tried to be a friend to people I cared for, and was glad of their company and friendship, though I always kept part of myself away from everyone.
Julie would invite me over for a sleepover whenever Melanie was coming, but she’d make up a story about why I HAD to be there, so Melanie wouldn’t know it was because Julie found her hard to take in large doses. Melanie didn’t like me very much, though I had nothing against her. At least at first.
She could be very mean. She’d make fun of my flat chest, and call me “Jezebel” for wearing lip gloss (at which point I’d escalate by digging around for some eye shadow, which I never wore). It was sometimes not pretty, the way we dealt with each other. My clothes were never appropriate for church, even though it was one of those progressive churches where people wore t-shirts and jeans or whatever (none of us went to that church as our ‘home church’ but when we had sleepovers it was the one we went to because Cesar Santiago (a friend of my mother’s) went there, and Julie had a crush on him). I always wore a dress, but that wasn’t good enough because it didn’t have sleeves. It DID have a full jacket, which I always kept on, but… it was always something. I realize now it was because of the way I looked. I was quite pretty, though I didn’t realize it at all. I’d been brainwashed by middle school.
The major difference between Melanie and me was that people tended to assume the best of me, or be nice to me, simply because I was cute. People made fun of her and were mean to her because of the way she looked. It wasn’t fair, and it bought her a LOT of slack from me. I made it a point of honor never to treat anyone the way I had been treated.
Needless to say, Melanie soon became part of the prayer club. She went to church with Pondscum. Pondscum had gotten the idea for a prayer club from a guy in their youth group who had started one at a nearby high school. Soon, there were plans to have a prayer club picnic, where the two clubs could meet and… pray, I guess. Or play Frisbee.
I promise this side story is relevant to the understanding of the last part of the story. You’ll just have to trust me.
Back to Ronnie… Ronnie had started coming to youth group with me, but generally avoided the Prayer Club. I think he just hated the idea of staying late at school. He was working on one of his spatter movies, anyway. I still sort of wonder why he bothered being my friend. We had so little in common, yet our friendship was very natural and easy. That year he started sharing music with me. I endured quite a lot of early Kate Bush on account of our friendship. Aw, truth is, I kind of liked it. I drew a picture of ghostly Cathy and quoted Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights song on one of my show pictures. It was drawn mostly to please Ronnie, though I only included it in the show because it was one of my better efforts.
Tomorrow, A Flower Blooms.
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quote:It felt false. For all I know for certain, she could have made it up. They never told me those things.
Oh, yes, I know that feeling. They used to test and test and test me, psychological tests, IQ tests, and they never told me anything afterward. To be fair, my mother never told us our numbers. When we claimed we were stupid, she would refute it, but not with specifics. (All she told us was, "two of you are above above average and two of you are above that. None of my children are stupid.") Still, it bothered me tremendously that I had to preform like a trained seal-- and then everyone knew what they said about me except me.
quote:I was quite pretty, though I didn’t realize it at all. I’d been brainwashed by middle school.
Ah, yes, I know that feeling, too. Except for me, the torment and the torture and the brainwashing started in about first or second grade, when kids started to realize exactly how different I was from them (not that I had a LOT of friends before that, but I got along okay.) By middle school, I couldn't take a compliment because I thought anyone who gave me one was either teasing me or trying to use me.
(((hugs))) Thank you for finishing it. I really do care about the rest. Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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I had trouble in first and second grade, too, but that was because, as I said, I fought back. Then we moved when my father retired, and I started at a new school. I did okay. I kept out of trouble, didn't try too hard to make friends, but didn't let them get too close. Then I got placed in a Christian school.
In Christian school I was a top student, and most of the families knew me from church. All the parents liked me because I was well-behaved and made good grades. Plus, I was very devout.
The devout part was genuine, the reserved part was just me trying to be perfect, trying to keep everyone at a distance.
To be honest, mom never told any of our IQs either, but the memory thing intrigued her, I think. My folks had had genetic counselling by the military doctors, and she used to say things like 'a child of ours would have a one-in-four chance of being X' and stuff like that. We all did well in school, but, ah, I don't know.
She had rheumatic fever in her senior year of HS and was told she wouldn't be able to persue her chosen career (nursing). It was an out-and-out lie, as far as I can tell, because she went back to school at 40 and graduated valedictorian of her nursing class. She had a lot of guts to do that, at her age.
She had married young and put all her energy into mothering, and she was good at it. Dad never let her take the tests to go on with her education, so maybe she had something to prove.
I think that is probably it, though she proved it herself well enough when she went back to school after the divorce. In any case, I'm not angry about it now.
In any case, I think the most remarkable thing about surviving childhood is that anybody does it without becoming a loony. Kids can be mean.
posted
(((hugs back))) I used to dream about changing schools... But I went to the same one K-6, and then the one that fed into 7 and 8, and the one that fed into 9-11. When I went to a different school 12th grade, it was not at all for a good reason.
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posted
As an Army Brat, I was very comfortable with change. Stability used to make me uneasy, but change was natural.
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posted
Hello! I don't know if anybody still cares, but I decided to go ahead and finish this story after all.
Sorry for the delay, but the anniversary of my mom's death came around and it was just too hard to deal with that and the insecurities I felt about the bits of my past that have already been revealed here. Plus, the memories I'm probing are kind of bittersweet viewed through the lens of twenty years or so.
Looking back, I see that there was a big change in me the last part of my Senior year. Not sure I really understand it, but here goes.
I didn’t expect it. I didn’t see it coming and I’m not sure what happened exactly. But, during the last half of my senior year, boys crawled out of the woodwork. I thought it was because of the surgery, because my mind had amplified this relatively minor defect. People told me then (and tell me now when they see the pictures), that they couldn’t tell any difference. I still don’t accept that, but have come to realize that my judgment may be skewed. *shrug* In any case, it is at least possible that my change in attitude might account for the difference in people’s response to me. I admit I don’t know.
I won an Honorable mention in the Scholastic Art show, and had my picture in the paper along with my buddy Rick Mathes (who was a Finalist) and one of the girls who joined the Navy. A few days after that, some guy named Keith called me out of the blue. Said he knew somebody who knew me. Anyway, he said he wanted to come visit me (he also knew where I lived >_< ) He showed up on Wednesday, just as we were leaving for church, so we took him along. Drove him home afterwards, too. He had walked about six miles to my house. He was a tall, monosyllabic country boy, who pronounced his name as if it had an ‘f’. I was terrified that my folks liked him.
We got back in the car after taking him home and going in to meet his grandmother. I was very quiet. Once we were on the road, my mother said, “Well.” She tapped her fingers on the car seat. Papa didn’t say anything – he started to sing “Froggy Went A-Courting” Mom and I started laughing, and I was much relieved. That was the weirdest one, but there were others. A string of them, though Froggy was probably the freakiest. This is where my belief that I’m a ‘freakshow magnet’ started. To be fair, the vast majority were only ‘freakshows’ around me. It’s also possible that I saw any sort of interested behavior as freakish, since my underlying assumption was that people would not be attracted to me. At least not anyone I that I also found attractive.
There was the boy who worked in the Library that I had noticed. Blond, wore glasses. Then I happened through the lunchroom and saw him eating with his mouth open. It was after that, of course, that he started passing me notes in Economics – showing off his poetry. “See how your name fits in the third stanza of this poem …” He was sweet, but all I could think of was the crumbs flying. I was way pickier than someone of my cuteness level should be, I guess.
Some of the teachers thought Rick Mathes and I were a thing. We had a tendency to spin around together and embrace in art class if our projects were going well. I liked him a lot, and I was evasive when the teachers asked, because I didn’t want to out him. Not that we ever talked about his sexual preference, but I knew he was gay. Speaking that supposition to anyone could have been dangerous for him. Mrs. Hoilman and one of the English teachers took me aside (separately, and on different occasions) and mentioned that I was too old for Pondscum. This was after he’d given me a pink, heart-shaped box of candy for Valentine’s day. My response was that we were just friends, and the box was PINK, not red, thankyouverymuch.
There was a sophomore named Ricky who was in band, which met as a 7th period class, so we were usually hanging around waiting on a ride at the same time, since the busses all left after 6th period. He was always flirting with me. You know, coming up behind me, covering my eyes in that old Guess Who? game. I always guessed him correctly – he had trumpeter’s calluses.
My mom gave him a ride home sometimes. Once, I slipped my hand around the seat and untied his shoelaces while he was leaning forward talking to my mom (I was in the front seat, he was riding in the back). I did it again after he re-tied his shoes. He grabbed my hand and held it. Actually, we didn’t hold hands, we sort of caressed hands. Fingertips trailing over the wrist, across the palm, between the fingers and back again. It was one of the more erotic experiences of my life up to that point, oddly enough. I think many times people don’t think of how many wonderful nerves there are in the space between one’s watchband and fingertips. You miss a lot when you go straight for the goodies.
I kept Ricky at a comfortable, friendly distance before and after that. It was No Big Deal. He grew up to manage a Dominoes Pizza that served where Ron and I lived when we first married. We got a lot of serious discounts we never asked for. I hope Ricky didn’t get himself in trouble over that.
Ronnie was the same old Ronnie, though, no matter what seemed to be happening to the other fellas within sniffing distance of me. He let me borrow tapes of U2 and Kate Bush. I’m VERY grateful for the U2. I didn’t listen to ‘secular’ music as a general rule, but he got around that. “They’re a Catholic band,” he’d said. *snicker* He was slick when he wanted to be, though most of the time he was just pleasantly oddball-funny. We had lunch together almost every day.
The prayer club was still a big deal to me. Our small numbers increased gradually. Members of the other High School’s prayer club (who went to church with Pondscum) even showed up for a few of our meetings before we had our picnic at the lake. Robert P. , the leader of the other group, came to lead our group a few times. Melanie was there, all excited because a fella named Jamie that she knew from church came with Robert.
Julie spoke of Jamie with sympathy because he was kind to Melanie, often spending an hour after church talking to her and listening to her problems. Melanie was a bit of a Psychic Vampire (tm Claudia Therese), and Julie knew Jamie was being sucked dry. Melanie was interested in him as more than a friend. He was the only guy she knew who was more kind to her than necessary.
A girl named Natalie also started coming to our Prayer club, because of the visitors she knew from her youth group. She went to the same church as Melanie, Pondscum and the others. Natalie was a hoot. She went on and on about how completely yummy Robert was. It was true, he was all kinds of good. Good looking (in that skinny, pretty-boy way I always went for), a good leader, a good artist (I took second place to him in the city art competition, and didn’t mind a bit). Just a nice guy. Not too much later, he started attending church where I did, but he never showed any interest in me. Whatever was going on with me, boys I actually found interesting were immune to it, as far as I could tell.
The next time the other group from the other high school came to our meeting (after our joint picnic), Jamie mentioned there was going to be a dance at his school and asked me if I’d like to go. I was loading my locker, and said, “Sure” sort of absent-mindedly.
It occurred to me that Melanie would be mad, but it was too late. Jamie looked so pleased. He was cute. Turns out, the ‘dance’ he’d mentioned so casually was his Junior Prom. >_< The books slid out of my locker onto my head about the same time I realized what I’d done. There would be repercussions.
The dance itself was an hour or two of awkwardness. I couldn’t back out without hurting Jamie, but for Melanie’s sake I was determined not to have fun. Well, no. Knowing Melanie was hurt by it (and would get back at me somehow) made it no fun. At least I had a dress.
Mom had taken me out to find a dress for this dance that would also work for my own prom. This was a challenge because I was so skinny and flat-chested. I finally opted for a dress that I could also wear to church, if I wore the matching jacket. It was a pale peach thing with spaghetti straps and a much lower neckline than anyone with larger breasts could wear and still manage to look modest. The back of the jacket was lace. I got a lot of mileage out of that dress; I even wore it to my first college formal. I think it was the single most expensive article of clothing I had ever had up to that point. Mom didn’t mind buying it for me, even though I didn’t have a date to my own prom yet.
Turns out, getting a date was the least of my prom-related worries.
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posted
Thanks. I know it's a bit of a ramble, but I appreciate you guys bearing with my therapy. I'm trying to break it up into smaller chunks.
I was talking the last few posts about how badly I misread some fellas' intentions, or at least how messed up I was when it comes to interpreting the most basic boy/girl social interactions. Eh, I was young and sheltered, though one of my relatives recently pointed out that I wasn't sheltered by anybody but myself. Once more into the breach (of my embarrassing social history, though ... I think it is relevant).
Julie also brought a guy to Prayer Club – a football player named Mike. He had a very good sense of humor, a ready laugh and one of those faces that says ‘I’m only joking’ even when he wasn’t. We welcomed him easily enough to our group (he was second string ).
I have mentioned that I worked in the Science office during Fourth Period. There were three versions of fourth period because your fourth period class determined your lunch time. My lunch was between third and fourth, but the science department took lunch in the middle of fourth period. Sometimes Mr. Bingham would take his lunch in the science office, and send me back to the lunchroom with his tray when the class started up again.
One day, I had to take his tray and the physics teacher’s as well. It was a little awkward, and I bumped into a guy as I was making my way through the lunchroom. He was one of our special students, but not for the usual reasons, evidently. For example, Rhonda, who had just started coming to Prayer club with Beth, had CP. Her family was kind of neglectful (she had trouble brushing her teeth and they wouldn’t help her) so Beth and I would stop by to see her on weekends to make sure she got the help she needed with basic care. She was really neat, great sense of humor. Some people are uncomfortable around people with CP, but one of my sister’s friends had CP and I was used to being with people that faced those particular challenges.
But this guy wasn’t a ‘special student’ because of physical stuff; he was kind of psychotic. I later learned that the kids called him Chester the Molester because of his tendency to grab girls for little or no reason.
Anyway, I bumped him, and my, “Oh, excuse me! I’m sorry I’m so clumsy” (I always overdid apologies) was seen as a pledge of heartfelt interest in being molested. He followed me back to the Science office, but he kept his distance and I didn’t notice. When he knocked on the door, I opened it and he started talking and kind of pressing his way into the room. I told him he had to go, because I had work to do and if Mr. Bingham came in (there was another door that went into Mr. B’s classroom at the other end of the office) he’d be in trouble. He agreed to go and asked for a hug.
It was obvious he wasn’t all mentally there and I made the mistake of thinking ‘mentally handicapped’ means ‘harmless’ and allowed myself to be subjected to a very aggressive ‘hug’. I should have hit him or something, but it just seemed wrong to smack someone with a disability. I could have run into the classroom, but was mortified at the thought of having to explain why I interrupted class.
Those things went through my mind very quickly, a couple of seconds, maybe. Before I could decide what to do, a big hand grabbed the little guy by the shoulder and yanked him off me. My rescuer was Mike the Football Player (second string). He got rid of Chester, who never bothered me again. I mean, he tried to bother me again, but I saw him coming. He was not a big guy, and I knew I could hurt him (was maybe even looking for an excuse to do so). A hard look and a warning gesture kept him away.
Mike proved harder to get rid of. I don’t know why he showed up when he did, if he saw Chester or was just coming to see me, but he came around more often after that. I wouldn’t let him in the office, but he’d peek in the window and wave, and I’d go to the door and talk to him. Mostly I’d tell him to go away, because I had work to do. He was fun to talk to, but not my type. Not one for the big, beefy guys, I guess. I liked my fellas a bit shorter, smaller and altogether more manageable back then. Not sure why I usually went for guys I suspected I could beat at arm wrestling, but there you go. I DID get over that, by the way.
He ended up doing the same sort of thing as Chester, in a way, though he kept his hands to himself. That is, he claimed he’d only go away if I’d kiss him on the cheek, or some such. I never agreed to go out with him, though I did invite him to church with me. My folks picked him up in our car. He endured the service with good humor, and forced a goodnight kiss on me when we took him home. With my parents in the front seat. O_O A bold one, was Mike.
Julie had liked Mike (which was why she’d asked him to the prayer club), but she forgave me readily enough. I really didn’t go for him. As a joke, she and Melanie gave me a necklace with bell on it. Livvy’s coming! Hide your men!
Ronnie just rolled his eyes when I wore the bell. He laughed at my foolishness in opening the door for Chester the Molester, even though I’d had no idea who he was. I usually didn’t mention guys to him, because he tended to poke fun at me over my taste in men and my handling of the overzealous ones. He was right, though. I probably DID care more about their feelings than was actually good for me. Ronnie was becoming very active in my youth group. I was trying to get him involved in the youth drama program, since he had such an interest in acting and making movies. He was ambivalent.
One cool thing about having Ronnie at church was that my mother loved him. She was always teasing and picking on him. She loved to make him blush, because he was so fair you could see the blood travel up his face. She made a game of trying to get the blush all the way to the tips of his ears.
For me, it was just that he was so easy to be around, even though he never really cut me any slack. He would always tell me more than I wanted to hear about Doctor Who, or whatever. Oddly enough, it was Pondscum who introduced me to Douglas Adams. You’d think that would be right up Ronnie’s alley, but no. He gave me music and suggested I watch Monty Python, but he never loaned me books. Ronnie was not much of reader. I’d tease him about his Cliff’s notes, and he’d just say that I did enough reading for all of us.
In the next part of the story, I do something especially stupid that changes everything.
Posts: 9293 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
Isn't there something in the user agreement about cliffhangers not being allowed? I could have sworn that there was.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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Wow. I just read this whole thread today, and now I'm riveted right along with everyone else. You're an awesome storyteller, Olivet. Thanks for sharing.
Posts: 952 | Registered: Jun 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Noemon: Isn't there something in the user agreement about cliffhangers not being allowed? I could have sworn that there was.
There really should be, neh?
Oh, Pa-a-pa!
(Keep it coming, Olivia! )
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Thank you, everyone, for your kind words and encouragement. I hope I do not disappoint you. The journey, for me, is more the point of this than the arrival, so I appreciate your patience.
I'll post today's bit in two pieces - one now and one later tonight. Just to keep the post manageable.
Again, sorry for the delay. I've had a chest cold. please forgive any strange spelling or grammar mistakes. I'm medicated.
I just realized something this weekend. At the time of these events, I was 45 lbs. lighter than I am now. Most of you who have met me in person may find that as shocking as I do. I mean, I could stand to lose a few pounds, but 15-20 at the maximum. Perhaps I have some huge blind spot when it comes to the weight I should be, but I think I look pretty good. I mean, for a woman my age. *shrug* I cannot imagine… nevermind. On with the story.
In Christian school, the principal nicknamed me “Bloodhound” because I could always tell where he was in the building by following the scent trail if his cologne. He wore Lagerfeld, which I enjoyed for its tendency to be light. Polo was popular then, but it has always given me a headache. Anyway, this talent came in handy when we wanted to sneak back into class without changing out of our gym clothes. (The dress code required girls to wear skirts, except during P.E.) Word got back to him, and he thought it was neat. Or maybe he was trying to give me a positive nickname so the group would stop calling me “Brainiac”. It didn’t stick.
The point is that I did have an unusually sensitive sense of smell when I was younger (though I did have a sort of scent Renaissance when I was pregnant). I was always affected by smell – the scents of my loved ones, that sort of thing. Tended to have a calming affect on me, as I was a bit touch-averse. Touch aversion evidently tends to go along with … certain other aspects of my personality. I was born into a family of huggers and went to a church of huggers. I was cool with embraces, but very tetchy about certain touches, especially along my forearms. *shrug* I also tended to have a wider ‘personal bubble’ than anyone in family. My mother’s personal space was bare inches from her nose. I swear she used to back me across a room, just having a conversation. We had long talks with me sitting on the kitchen counter, just so I could get some space between us. *giggle*
One night, Mom and I went by to pick Ronnie up for church. I think something was wrong with his car. I had only been by his house a couple of times, and had rarely spoken to his mother. Mom waited in the car while I went up to knock. Ronnie’s mother, Bonnie, answered the door.
“Hi. We’re here to pick up Ronnie for church.”
“Oh, yeah. Come in.”
When I got in, she said, “He’s upstairs taking a shower. Why don’t you go up and wait for him?” She was already leading the way.
Had his mom just told me to wait for him in his room? Why not just wait downstairs, in the sitting room? Their family was different than mine, yes indeedy.
When I got up there, I realized most of the upstairs was actually Ronnie’s domain. His room had it’s own sitting room, all gables and slanted ceilings. It was, I guess, a typical teenaged boy type of place – messy, beanbag chairs and a futon strewn with clothes. He had his own TV with games and VHS tapes everywhere. Scattered gadgetry.
She warned him I was there, so he came out of bathroom mostly dressed. The stuffy room filled with excess shower steam. He greeted me with a hug, like he usually did outside of school. His smell hit me, under that nice, clean soapy smell. It was odd, his personal smell.
I think I had noticed it at his father’s funeral, but played it off as grief-sweat. Then in the months after that, he’d often gone a week or so without benefit of water, so that the funk hung around him in a cloud. But clean like that – fresh from the shower – it was till there. An unnatural smell, almost, were it not for the fact that it most definitely WAS his natural smell. Vaguely metallic and organic at the same time, like kitchen shears used to cut bacon and never properly washed, or a handful of pennies dipped in lard.
Maybe the metal smell was his blood. He was so fair that you could always see it, just under his translucent skin. Maybe I could smell it because he was freshly shaven. I don’t know. I’m sure this is a huge disappointment to those of you who were so anxious to know why he smelled like pennies. It wasn’t pennies exactly, but there was something wrong about it that I couldn’t place.
While he toweled his hair, he showed me a picture of the Ellis family ruin in the old country, which he had framed on his wall. We chatted. He had this cool Thom Baker Dr. Who scarf that was 25 feet long. His treasures were very interesting to me, not at all the sorts of things I thought of as typical. Then again, I was sheltered.
Mom was waiting, so we split as quickly as we could. Wednesday was the night when the Youth met separately, and it was usually a lot of fun. Ronnie was generally subdued, like he wasn’t quite comfortable with the group. At least, he wasn’t as talkative as he usually was when it was just me, or the gang at the lunch table in school.
Mom usually listed to the services from the Tape Room, where the sermons were recorded. After church, she’d make copies for the shut-ins who had requested them. Sometimes if the service was particularly good, people in attendance would ask for a copy, and she would speed dub them while they waited.
This particular night, there were a lot of requests for copies of the sermon. Ronnie and I waited for her in the car. It was raining, and the windows fogged a bit. I commented on it, joking that “Mom will think we were up to something.” I really didn’t think she would think that, but I knew she would say something, just to make him blush.
“At this rate, we could have grandchildren,” he joked back. “The church should just buy her a cot.” Well, his joke was something like that. The ensuing trauma wiped whatever it was right out of my head. The point is, it made me laugh.
Ronnie always made me laugh. It was so comfortable and easy to be with him; the weirdness I was noticing from other boys never seemed to interfere. I knew he wasn’t interested in me, which was a big reason why it was so comfortable. He’d talk about girls with me and I figured he went for the buxom type, which was definitely not me.
Anyway, he made me laugh and I kissed him. It was impulsive, even a little pranky. An I-wonder-what-he’ll-do sort of thing.
He kissed me back, and I think that surprised me. Not that I expected him to say, “Eeew!” and wipe his mouth on his sleeve. Or maybe I did. In any case, I never in a million years expected what happened after the kiss.
He said, “I love you.”
I don’t remember what I said, because inside I was panicking. Oh, Crap, oh, crap! Crap, crap, Oh, crap! He said he loved me. Needless to say, I was new to the whole “love confession” thing.
He said he loved me; he said he’d been in love with me for a long time, at least since his father died. He said he’d done drugs and wanted to die, back then, but that he’d stopped because he knew I could never love someone that messed around with drugs. I brought him to church. I saved his life, and he loved me.
I loved him, too. I really did; I just wasn’t sure it was that kind of love. Was it? I just didn’t know. Crap! Oh, crap.
I sat there, trying not to cry as the beautiful fiction of our friendship crumbled in my hands. In its place was my friend’s naked heart, and I couldn’t drop it. I couldn’t bear to lose him; I couldn’t bear what might happen if I hurt him.
That all seems quite melodramatic now, but when you’re seventeen, everything is of consequence. I know we joke about teens making too much of everything, but the truth is that everything you do at that age does have consequences. How you deal with things then affects who you are, who you become. At least it seems so to me.
This incident is probably why, as I got older, I tended to freak out more and more when a guy said he loved me. The first guy I dated in college, for example.
We’d been going out a month or so. We had an understanding that we could see other people (my grandmother had made me promise not to “fall for the first little boy that comes along” and to casually date a lot of boys, so I’d be sure when I found the right one) but neither of us had actually done it. We were playing a board game in my dorm room. The school required the door be open at least six inches, and male visitors had to sign in. In any case, we were snuggled up close, stopping every so often to kiss. After one such kiss, he held me close and whispered something in my ear.
It could have been my name, or it could have been those three little words (they do sound quite similar, if whispered very softly – the consonants and vowels are in the right places). I thought it was those three little words, and I stiffened. My body has always been a million times more honest than my lying, lying brain.
Anyway, he noticed it, and I felt the tension in him crank up a notch. I decided to act like he’d said my name, so I sighed back with his name, and kissed him again. I kissed him until I felt the tension ease out of him. I’m still not sure what he had said, but I think I was right.
A few weeks later, as we said goodnight, he said, “I have to tell you something, but I want you to understand that I mean it in a very Christian way.”
This was a bit worrying, but I said, “Sure.”
“I love you, but I mean, you know, as a sister in Christ. The, you know, the Christlike way we’re supposed to love each other.”
I smiled and told him that I loved him, too, in that same, wonderful, agape way… that Christians are supposed to love… everyone. *shrug* Boys are so weird.
My own Beloved husband even had to deal with that particular aversion of mine. Not surprisingly, he handled it very well. We’d been meeting after the Library closed and talking until 3am for over a week, when he finally gave me a reasonably chaste kiss on the lips. By the second week, he was trying to hold my hand in public. “You don’t understand,” I said. “This is a very small school. If we’re seen holding hands, we might as well be engaged.”
He said he didn’t care, because he was in love with me. I scoffed.
“You do NOT love me. We’ve only known each other two weeks.” He laughed at me.
“When did you become an expert on other people’s feelings, Miss Thang?”
He had me there, but I wasn't going to give up. “Well, I don’t love you.”
“You will.” He smiled when he said it. And dang if he wasn’t right.
But when Ronnie said it that night in the church parking lot, it was new territory for me. I’d kissed his lips and screwed up everything.
Mom came out and made a crack about the foggy windows, like I knew she would. Ronnie blushed, redder than ever, like I knew he would.
We rode home in companionable conversation, but I was a ball of nerves. Everything was different, and it felt very, very weird.
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posted
I'd say mid way. Seriously, the part that was keeping me up nights... we're halfway there.
Sorry for my long-windedness. I'm using this to work through some stuff more than trying to craft a tight narrative. I mean, obviously.
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Don't apologize for your longwindedness. I'm not generally a huge fan of landmark posts, but I actively scan the page to see if you may have updated this thread every time I check the forum. I've found the entire thing fascinating, and have apreciated the length. I'm not really looking forward to it being over, to tell you the truth.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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Wow, I need to do this, but I think I need at least another 10 years of perspective first. And I do identify with a bunch of what you've said so far.
posted
I feel horrible for posting this, but every time I look at the thread title, I read something different... Posts: 3389 | Registered: Apr 2004
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He was a tall, monosyllabic country boy, who pronounced his name as if it had an ‘f’. I was terrified that my folks liked him.![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
