I was driving into work today, sipping my home-made all fruit smoothie (8 oz non-fat milk, 1 whole frozen banana cut, 3 frozen strawberries and 4 mango pieces on blend for 45 seconds.
Mmm Mmmm), thinking about how far I have to go and that this week has been a struggle as I try to find my feet and define this project outside of just a blog about another fatty losing weight.
A song came on the radio called Cannonball by the Breeders (fronted by Kim Deal), which came out circa early nineties.
The song, lyrically made no sense to me (“I know you / You Cuckoo / You cannonball”) at the time, but as I have gotten older it has more meaning to me, but I digress, the silliness of the song is what got me thinking.
A lot of people have impacted my life in so many ways, but there are a very fine handful that have steered me into the man I am and the man I still want to be.
Of course take my kids and parents out of the equation, they have a story yet to be posted, but this one is not about them.
A song has a way of delivering you to a very specific place in time, if it is strong enough, so strong you can feel and smell the emotion and electricity in the air all over again, so much you get goose bumps, like I have now recalling and had this morning when the song came on.
I don’t believe in soul mates or “the one”; I do believe in strong compatibility and though the recent events of my life tell me that even that is a lie, I hold firmly to the fact that even though they never meet, the probability of there being someone out there who is so compatible with you, that it makes your life stronger.
I think I had met and lost this person in my life.
Since her, I have loved tremendously strong, so much that I though my life would end when the relationship did; but none have had the pure raw emotional impact in my life, and so ground-bracingly shook me as Janet Duckworth.
I met Janet first, from afar, we both worked for the City of Salt Lake over a summer long ago – but not together, I was trimming some needled bush at Fairmont park and saw a few girls and guys raking rotten leaves along the fence line.
She was one of them, I pointed her out to my friend James and he knew her from our high school; they were both Juniors while I was a sophomore.
Instantly, I was attracted.
Janet does not have the looks of a runway model; she was more beautiful than that.
She had the plain looks of the girl next-door meets Jane Goodall (another of my fav’s), and the smarts to match (her senior year she was Sterling Scholar Sciences).
Our first day back to school, my junior year, we ended up having a class together, Cultural Anthropology with Mr. Brown.
Her very first words to me were, and I remember them in total to this day, “Weren’t you the dumbass who crashed one of the city trucks?”
Indeed I was that dumbass.
Over the course of the next few weeks, we disagreed over anthropology, literature and music.
Eventually we started hanging out after school s a foursome with James and their friend Kathy (Cathy?) Bills.
This turned into Janet and I hanging out as “friends” more and more alone.
I was falling madly in love with her, as much as any 16 year old knows what love is (despite the current pop trend leading us to believe that 14 year old children should be out hitting that).
Janet and I would sit in her mother’s room watching movies and arguing over music.
I was desperately trying to hang on to my urban cultural vibe, not unlike a certain Rob Van Winkle, while she was into the music of ex-front man of Genesis Peter Gabriel.
I couldn’t stand that crap.
But we would talk well into the night, sneaking drinks of Schnapps (peppermint) or whatever else was around until her mom would come home and realize I was still there and she would politely remind Janet it was time for me to go home.
The defining night of my teenage years, to that point, came on a night like this.
But something different happened.
I had never mentioned to Janet how I cared for he, and of course, she was never going to admit the same; it almost seemed like any foray into “dating” would ruin the friendship and the relationship as a whole, so I stayed back from that.
This night though something happened.
The song Cannonball came on the radio, and we started howling with laughter as we both started singing, “I’ll be the bong / in this reggae song!”.
Janet thought this was the most ridiculous song she had ever heard, but later on it became our anthem, our memory.
It has made its way into a lot of mixes and sits on my iPod to this day.
We had finished of the Schnapps hours ago and were settling into a playful game of tag, for whatever reason, around her house – sobering up, but blaring the music (which was the Breeders, we had it on loop apparently), laughing and running.
Well, I fell.
I rolled over onto my back and next thing I knew dear Penthouse…. just kidding…. next thing I knew, Janet was pinning me to the ground and asking me if I had ever played ten things.
I asked her what the hell that was and she replied I had to name ten things of her choosing or there was to be a penalty.
SO, she chose fruit.
Of I went; Apple, Orange, Grape, Grapefruit, Strawberry, Banana, Blackberry, Blueberry, Kiwi and my mind went blank with one more to go, I fought hard, as I didn’t want this damn penalty she spoke of.
I thought with genius, Tangelo!
This is a real fruit, look it up.
Janet’s reply was that she had never heard of it and I lose.
She lowered her face to mine and pressed her lips against my own.
She was kissing me.
Me?
Yes, the electricity charged thorough me.
I had never been truly kissed before.
I have been kissed since, I have been kissed with desire, with passion, with contempt; I have been kissed hello and goodbye.
The sweetness of this first, fumbling, innocent, short kiss melts my heart every time I think of it; no kiss has EVER measured up to my first kiss when I was 16.
There is more to the story, but I have rambled on for nearly two pages in Word.
I will post some more soon, when I can get past the good thoughts and tell the real story of how this went from there.
I do have a long journey ahead, but the choices I have made, the roads I have travelled have made me, for good or bad.
Now, if you will excuse me I am going to go listen to the greatest hits of my favorite artist, Peter Gabriel, “So”.
No comments:
Post a Comment