Mar
22
Time melts into nothing and nothing’s changed
Filed Under astruc | 16 Comments
I’ve been gone for too long. It’s really hard to get back into writing every day. I’ve been making some small effort, carrying my notebook and pen around again, jotting down small observations. And that’s about it. Right now I am waiting for the mailing list notify software to upload to my server. If I find more toys to play with, I don’t have to write!
Nan has good days and bad. I don’t think she was fully prepared for how much this was going to hurt. Her surgeon noted that this was the largest mesh ever installed laparoscopically. We’re all very proud. Trouble is, they staple that shit down. When she was recovering from the first cancer surgery, she was on a morphine drip. I think, I hope that time is just a blur for her now.
This time, Nan was punted quickly in an effort to avoid infection. So pain management hasn’t been stellar.
I have seen Timmy. I laughed so very hard when I saw what he was driving. A silver supercharged S-Type. We are two of a kind. And lo, he is no longer married.
“Stop smiling,” he said, when he told me.
The S-Type has been pulled from the next model year’s lineup, to be replaced by something that resembles a Nissan Sentra. I am very, very unhappy with this development.
So, guys, I need a favor. Ask me some questions or something. I don’t know what the hell to write about. I’ve been gone since 2002, more or less. What would you like to know?
Mar
22
Here is another test
Filed Under astruc | 4 Comments
because heidi said she got it to work.so i am testing again. sob!i want to do a podcast. Fandango Matt said I shouldn’t bother because people never watch them. But I think people would watch mine. The men would watch to see if I take my shirt off, and the women would watch to see if I’ve gotten fat. Woohoo!
Mar
22
This is a test
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This is a test to see if I’ve fixed the linebreak problem in Safari.All we do here is watch Law and Order and eat.I went to the supermarket today.It rained very hard.
Mar
21
I half-assedly hid the last entry. It will be back soon. I stupidly made the change in Safari rather than Firefox and therefore stripped out the freaking line breaks. I have to fix it.
Nan is doing ok. She gets better every day, but I don’t think she was expecting this whole mess to be as painful as it is.
More later, we’re heading out to the boat and I am pressed for time.
Mar
15
The phone in the hut rang close to midnight. It was my sister JoJo, her voice hushed so as not to wake her daughter. “Sara. Who knows you’re in Florida?”
I knew she meant my hometown friends, the women I’d grown up with, forming the core of my Florida friends as well. “No one, really,” I said. I’d planned to send out a group email but I wanted a few days alone before I jumped back into my old social fray.
“You are not going to believe who sent me a message on MySpace looking for you.”
“Who?” I couldn’t think of anyone from back home who wouldn’t know how to contact me.
“Timmy McCartney.”
“You are kidding me,” I gasped. “Does he know I’m back?”
“He didn’t say. He just said your email address was bouncing and that he wanted to say hi.”
“Huh.”
“I know. Is he still married?”
“I don’t know. I assume so, but he’s not plugged in anymore,” I said, referring to the aforementioned social fray.
“He has a page on MySpace. Two pages. One is personal, and one is for his band.” Timmy had been in a band in high school, too. I spent a little while looking at the pictures and listening to his music. Then I dug up what I wrote about him, back in 1998:
NOVEMBER 18, 1998 | ALUMNI DIRECTORY
NOVEMBER 19, 1998 | LUNCH WITH TIMMY
Holy shit, that was ten years ago. Anyway, I left a lot out. I alluded to the omissions in the entry: I’ll tell the whole story eventually. Stuff I didn’t want to be facing yet in 1998. Stuff that I’ve been thinking about way too much in the years since I stopped writing here. Mostly about David.
Nan made me promise I wouldn’t talk until she was dead, but I think she’s going to outlive me, so I am not sure I will be keeping that promise. I came here in November to talk to David’s best friend, nearing the end of his life. I wasn’t sure what he could tell me, and I was frightened by the prospect of speaking to him.
Timmy. Hard to stay on topic. Timmy and I broke up the day David died. I telephoned his house to tell him my dad was dead. Until I called him I had been like a social robot, making polite little telephone call to my friends. By the time I reached my third friend, Paige Thorne, she already knew, and Mrs. Thorne took the phone from Paige’s hand and told me gently that she would make the rest of the calls.
The only other person I had to call was Timmy. He and David had genuinely liked each other. I understand now why David liked Timmy, though at age 15 I hadn’t yet figured it out. They were both outsiders in preppy clothing. Look, Muffy, a book for us!
So I told him David was dead, in my polite little robot voice, and he said he’d be right over. We lived nine blocks apart, an easy trip on his skateboard. We frequently sneaked out and spent the night at each other’s houses. Old houses with thick walls and service stairs will hide any transgression. I had slept at his place a week before.
It amazes me to think about this now, we were so young, we were children. I can’t remember what I ate for dinner yesterday, but I remember what I felt, waking up in his dark childhood bedroom, wrapped in a plaid comforter and his Ocean Pacific sweatshirt in the hours before dawn.
There was a sense that we were playing house, trying each other on for size. And the competing thoughts– that we were old inside for children, life had been scary and capricious. He was the second man I ever had sex with. It’s been more than twenty years and he’s still annoyed that he wasn’t the first.
I was still a virgin at this point, and I still felt like I should be, and I was starting to realize that if Timmy and I continued down the path we were heading, that I would sleep with him. I was hanging on by the finest of threads, and all of this was kind of building up.
So when he said he’d come over, I told him no. He asked me when, and I said “I can’t” and I hoped he understood, even though we were just kids, barely 15 years old. And we hung up gently and he left me alone until the following fall. But that one telephone call that terrible day messed me up inside for a long time after that.
Nan had taken us out of school and we were hiding in our winter house in Palm Beach. I never finished the ninth grade. We came back in the fall. I showed up at football practice, and walking across the field the first person I saw was my journalism advisor. He was smart enough to not fuss over me, prickly and angry and raging at loss.
Instead he smiled mildly and said “welcome back” and the next person I saw was Timmy and he took my hand and we walked into town, to Seventh Street, and we got a slice and he walked me home and left me there.I don’t know why he’s looking for me. Or maybe I do. We’ll see.