I know that it’s only quarter-to-nine, but I’m already suspicious about the day. I’ll shake it off, though, because the feeling is unwarranted. This is the problem–
Everything is going really well.
I don’t always know what to do with “really well”. If the day was crappy, I’d know exactly in which pigeonhole to stuff the thing, but the past 3 days have gone so perfectly, with no sense of rush or confusion, that I am feeling wary. This is all normal, I’m told.
My mom and I have been invited to a brunch this morning. It should be pretty fun. The folks serving it are old friends and they live just up the road. They were originally summer people from Croton-on-Hudson, but they moved here permanently many years ago. I grew up with their children for some of the time, and playing with them was a welcome relief from playing with the local kids. I guess there was a point in my growing up that I realized that there were all kinds of social structures active in my life of which I had never been aware. I suddenly saw that many people in the small town were resentful of how my family was able to live. This mostly had to do with the fact that my father was not a farmer and my mother stayed at home and raised the kids. We toiled neither in the fields nor in the nearby paper mill. “What does your father do?” was a common question in school. The answer that he was a writer was more than not greeted with a confused scrunching up of the face and more questions–“What does he write?”. You all see where this is going. How I wished, sometimes, that my father dug ditches and my mother was a truckstop waitress. Anyway, the kids up the road, Danny, and his sister Jessica, were a welcome change from this pattern. They were familiar with artists, writers, and so on. It was not unusual to them. I’m afraid, though that it was not always the easiest of friendships. I must have seemed pretty messed up and somewhat backwards, socially inept, and, if I was lucky, painfully shy.
We lost touch around the same time that I went to boarding school, in 1980.
I ran into Danny in college in 1984. But since then, nothing. Jess has just finished a long tenure working for ‘Market Place’ on Public Radio International. I haven’t seen her since I was about 12. And now we are having brunch in less than an hour? Wow. What could happen? I’m really excited about this whole thing, and a little nervous. Should I remember that maybe Dan and Jess, for all their worldly aplomb, might just be a little nervous as well? Stay tuned, readers, for tomorrows update!
Johnnyboy
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