2010 has been very strange.  At the beginning of the year, I was still on blogging hiatus, so it took a while to get back up to speed.  Springtime was crazy, with lots of great musical endeavors and memorable trips.  By the summer, both my life and this blog went into overdrive, when I really started writing again, and found my full stride while sharing a bit too much about my childhood.  Suddenly it was October, which is the month of my birth, but this year was also the month of my stepdad’s death, which has sent everything into a tailspin since then.  A surreal trip to Yakima for the funeral was followed by multiple trips to Seattle, both for gigs and for family functions.

There were some standout moments from this last year that didn’t manage to make it into the blog, for various reasons.  For example, here’s a video of a particularly interesting recording session that I was lucky enough to be involved with, albeit in a small way.  A local singer-songwriter, who is also a friend, put the word out on SocialNetwork that she wanted to create a cacaphony of 50 pianos, all playing an F chord at the same time.  I jumped at the chance.  She rented a piano showroom downtown, and my friend and I (and forty eight or so other people) joined in to participate.  I brought my camera to capture a bit of the action.

Another memorable moment from this last year was Trek in the Park.  This theater group gets together every year to re-create a famous episode from the original Star Trek television series.  This year’s was Space Seed, in which we meet the infamous character Khan (who returned in the movie The Wrath of Khan).  It was a very well-done production, with live music and everything. . .and it was all free of charge.  Here’s the climactic fight sequence between Kirk and Khan.

IrishBand released our self-titled EP this year, as well as an amazing animated video that a friend created for us.  I would post that here, but our band name is very unusual, hence the pseudonym.  To celebrate, we went to Port Townsend, Washington (the hometown of three of the band members, and an adopted home away from home for the rest of us) to play a CD release party and catch the Rhododendron Festival and parade and everything.  It’s always a huge party weekend for PT, and this year was the tenth reunion for PT High School, which included Violinist and a bunch of other friends, so I actually went to the reunion barbecue in Chetzemoka Park during the afternoon, since I knew so many of the people there.  (God forbid that I actually go to any of my own class reunions; I haven’t yet.)  I also performed in the parade, in disguise, as an honorary member of Nanda.  I’m the guy with the Mexican wrestling mask, playing the bass, miming along to the dance music that was blaring from the speakers in the back of the truck.

I had the opportunity to see the Oregon Symphony perform many times this last year, with some pretty big-name performers.  Violinists Midori and Hilary Hahn, violinist Pinchas Zukerman and his cellist wife Amanda Forsyth (who, incidentally, gave a cello master class at the Old Church that afternoon, which I also attended, even though I’m far from being a cello master) who performed Brahms’s Double Concerto together, and a number of others.  This month, I have a ticket for pianist Emanuel Ax’s concert, which I’m very much looking forward to.  Yo-Yo Ma performed here a month or so ago, but his concert was sold out in the spring, only a few weeks after tickets went on sale.  Curses.

So it’s been a good year, overall, but I’m really hoping that 2011 is better, or less confusing at the very least.  I have lofty goals for the upcoming year, which include finding a job, finding love and a real relationship, taking care of some things that have been dogging me for a while now, and producing more CD’s.  I have a bit of news on the music front, actually.  A friend of mine hurt her arms a year ago, and has since been unable to play the piano, but that hasn’t stopped her from singing, or from writing lyrics and melodies, or from having tons of ideas.  She e-mailed me at some point to ask what people in her position do in the music business.  I told her I don’t know about ‘the music business’, but I’d love to give the songs a listen, and that maybe I could put music to them.  She sent me some mp3′s, and I instantly felt like I knew where the songs should go.  They felt familiar without being predictable, which is always a good sign.  That was about two months ago, and we already have five or six collaborations in the works.  Pretty awesome and exciting.

In other news, December is the fourth anniversary of this blog, so it seems appropriate to have a little birthday party, no?  Come on, let’s have some sis-boom-bah.

So anyway, on to the Best Of.  Here are the lists of what I consider to the best entries BFS&T has to offer from this past year, which naturally includes a list of the most interesting dreams, as well.  Enjoy!

THE ENTRIES:

SteamCon – the steampunk convention in Seattle in which PolishCellist and I played, and had a total blast doing so

tragedy – the death of Stepdad

struggle – the early aftermath of the death of Stepdad

sitting here thinking about the Holocaust – one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard on the radio

folk festival fun – Portland Folk Festival, starring IrishBand, Dan Bern, Roll Out Cowboy, etc.

I’m kind of an a-hole – see for yourself

birthday present – prostitute schmostitute

the unicorn code – love it, learn it, LIVE IT

no one’s laughing – a peek into our family dynamics

déja vu – what it feels like, and a friend who claims to never have experienced one

the truth is out there – interesting UFO story, I promise

it’s not for shaving – Occam’s Razor, and how it applies to recording music

what if it is? – a very memorable and touching moment from the show Six Feet Under

THE CHILDHOOD STORIES:

shuttlecock

love and curiosity

he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother

the final innocent tryst

synchronicity

THE DREAMS:

lights, camera, dream

festival dream

shape shifters

inimitable and imitable

subconscious and libido

this needs a name

frozen

Just in case this wasn’t enough for your insatiable appetite for blog entries, here’s the Best of BFS&T 2009 entry, for your gluttonous pleasure.

Thanks for being here and reading all this, and for supporting this blog for such a long time now.  I really appreciate it.  I hope we all have an excellent New Year’s Eve, and Day, and that 2011 allows us to learn, and to grow, and to change for the better, a little bit each day.

Happy New Year!

I’m not really sure what to write about the last week.  I started about ten different sentences, and all of them seemed inadequate.  This may be a long entry.

The week was a flurry of activity, and much of it was either painful or surreal.  Mom’s friend was with her overnight to hold her hand and get her through the worst of the tremors and fits of sadness that woke her in the middle of the night.   The phone would start ringing early in the morning, and it wouldn’t stop until late in the evening.  The three of us (Brother, Mom’s friend and I) screened all the calls and relayed the messages, but after a couple of days we let the answering machine do what it was designed to do.  Everyone was very sweet and wanted to offer their condolences, but it was too much for Mom to deal with, so we handled them as tersely and courteously as we could.  We made sure that one of us was with Mom at all times, because she had occasional meltdowns, and whoever was around would go and wrap their arms around her while she sobbed.

We each had a thousand different feelings about this whole situation, and we spent lots of time discussing them.  We talked about the good things Stepdad did for us, the predicament he left Mom in, the personal quirks he had, and the mountain of tasks that lay ahead.  Brother started going through her finances, and luckily she was well taken care of in that respect.

In his note, Stepdad said that he wanted to be cremated, and that he didn’t want a graveside or memorial service.  “Cheap everything” was what he specified.  I’m glad that Mom decided to have both services, though, because it’s been hard enough to make sense of it all, even after seeing him at the funeral home.  In fact, when we arrived for the viewing, the woman asked if we were with the family, and we said we were.  I stepped up to go in first, and the woman motioned for me to walk down the hall.  I was expecting a chapel or something, with a little room on the side, so when I walked in to the tiny viewing room, I found myself right in front of the coffin and was very much caught off guard.  Stepdad looked like himself, and they did an excellent job of restoring him, especially given the nature of his death.  When Mom was able to go in, she made a point of touching his hair on the ‘natural’ side of his head that had been unaffected by the gun shot.

There were lots of family gatherings, as you would imagine.  They went surprisingly well, despite the fact that some of us had not seen each other for many years.  Times like those were when I felt the most estranged and uncomfortable, because some of the people there were ones I’ve made a conscious effort to keep a safe distance from.  I have a pretty low threshold for intense socializing anyway, but I had to ignore my impulses to flee and had to just tough it out.

Stepdad’s daughters scanned a ton of pictures and made a great slide show for the memorial service, which was very touching and honest.  They also had some pictures enlarged and placed on the table in the entry of the church, along with some things of his to remember him by, like his fishing equipment and tool bags that he took everywhere. That was a really nice touch.

The pastor of the church was friends with Stepdad, and he knew him well enough that the service felt genuine and unforced.  The church belongs to a very conservative denomination, and until very recently, they believed that when someone commits suicide, they are instantaneously banished to hell.  Thankfully for Stepdad, that belief has been tempered by modern knowledge of depression and mental illness, but I’m sure that some of the older folks in the congregation will be struggling to reconcile that.  The pastor said that this was his first time dealing with a suicide, and he was very candid about the fact that he did some research and found that the banished-to-hell idea came from Constantine instead of “from God”, so he felt very sure that Stepdad was where he wanted to be.  He spoke a great deal about depression being an illness that Stepdad struggled with, and that it wasn’t the work of evil forces or anything.  The previous pastor spoke a bit as well, and there was a lot of talk about Satan and evil, in a way that left a bad taste in many of our mouths.  That stuff is fine for a church service, but not for a memorial.  Incidentally, I still remember the last time I went to that church (we sort of went along with my mom for a while), and the theme of his sermon that day – “We Think Too Much” – was diametrically opposed to my spiritual ideologies, which were (and still are) tenuous even in the best of times.  The nicest part of the service, I thought, happened when they had an ‘open mic’ time for family and friends to share their memories.  There was just the right blend of laughter and tears, and it was very beautiful.  Brother read one of the Psalms earlier in the service, and I played cello during the slide show.

The rest of the week was spent taking care of Mom and of her house.  We all pitched in to do some of the things that needed to be done, and Brother’s Wife spent a bunch of time cleaning the house thoroughly.  We’d spent so much energy planning the service, and making the programs, and all the zillions of things that you have to deal with during the worst possible time, that by Friday, we were feeling a bit claustrophobic and needed some time apart, so Brother and I asked if we could have the evening free to meet up with a friend or two.  She readily agreed, and we gladly took the opportunity for a night out.  Brother and I went back to our respective homes on Sunday.  My drive home was pretty scary, since northwestern Oregon got hit by a particularly heavy storm that night.  It was so hard to see the road that I stopped in Cascade Locks to eat a veggie burger and calm my rattled nerves.

Since then, we’ve all been struggling to make sense of everything.  It still doesn’t seem real.   Both Brother and I have been feeling a distinct lack of motivation.  I had a few things that were planned already, and I’m doing them all, but I’m doing them on auto-pilot, and I feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience a lot of the time.   This is Halloween weekend, too, so there are a thousand parties and things happening, but my first inclination is to give them all a miss.  This would ordinarily be a week of celebration, since my birthday was a week and a half ago, and the previous few birthdays have all been stretched out into two-week extended parties, but I’m just not up to that right now.

There are more things, good and bad, that I may add to this later, but I wanted to write a little bit and start the process of focusing my thoughts again.  This kind of thing never makes sense, though, and many questions will always remain unanswered.

My stepdad committed suicide yesterday morning.

I got the call from my mom yesterday afternoon.  She asked if I was sitting down, and I told her I was.  I expected to hear that one of the dogs had died, or that one of her elderly friends was suffering from cancer or something, but she said that she came home from exercise class and was surprised by some notes Stepdad had left for her, then she went into the garage and found him dead from a gunshot wound.  None of us had any reason to see this coming.

He’d been suffering from a subtle chemical imbalance for three decades, and it had been well-managed the whole time, but his illness had taken a turn for the worse during the last couple of years, and he’d been unable to slough off his hopeless and obsessive thoughts.  He would sit listlessly in a chair, with a book in his lap, and stare off into space.  It was heartbreaking to see him at such a low ebb. He felt guilty for things he’d done, and for things he’d left undone, and for things that were outside of his control.  A year or so ago, his doctor had found a medication that seemed to work, at least for a while, but for the last few months, none of the various medications had taken hold.  Two weeks ago, the doctors discovered that he had low levels of testosterone, so they added some new medications to the anti-depressants they’d already prescribed.

I have to be honest; our relationship was challenging and difficult, even in the best of times.  We were about as opposite as it’s possible for two people to be.  When I was in high school and college, we could barely speak to each other without arguing.  Once, he even pushed me backwards down the hallway after a particularly ridiculous argument.  When I walked out the door that day, I knew I was saying the harshest and most shocking words his conservative Christian ears could hear:  “Go to hell.”

Over the last ten years, things have been much better.  He and I have mellowed with time and age, and my mom has been very good about creating bonds, as well as family events and traditions, and Stepdad and I became much closer.  But, as is the case with so many families, it’s never been easy.  That being said, he’s made great strides (and so have the rest of us) and I would say that this branch of our strange family tree is definitely the better for it.  He was the strong, silent type; always quick to help in whatever way he could.  He could fix absolutely anything, and he had an uncanny intuition for the way things worked, even if he’d never set eyes on them before.  It didn’t matter whether the things were cars, washing machines, or fruit trees; he somehow knew exactly what it took to make them flourish or perform at their best, which is an amazing gift.

I can’t help but think that the solution to his chemical imbalance was a mere week or two away, and that if he’d been able to hold on for a short time longer (or if he’d used pills instead of a gun) he’d still be here, and we’d all have that much more time together to sort out the medical issues.  For the last few months, he was gamely going along with the regimen of pills, and checkups, and everything that goes along with that sort of thing.  The e-mails and phone calls from my mom have been hopeful and promising.

I don’t know what else to say.  I can’t imagine what my mom must be going through.  I’ve had a couple of friends who have attempted suicide (both of whom are thriving now, thankfully), but Mom and Stepdad were married for almost twenty-five years, and they have countless links and ties to each others’ lives.  Luckily, Mom has people she can turn to for support during this terrible time, and she has a close friend who’s staying with her until my brother and I can get up there and be with her too.  Brother is heading over tonight, and I’m going tomorrow. Sister-in-Law and Niece will be joining us later in the week for the funeral service.

Please send some good thoughts (it’s too soon for phone calls) in my mom’s direction; she’ll be needing them.  And for God’s sake, if there’s someone in your life that you appreciate, do them a favor and let them know it.

Synchronicity is a term that was coined by Carl Jung to describe an ‘acausal connecting principle’, which is the short way of explaining a situation in which two unrelated events have an almost preternatural link, in a way that was unknown at the time of the first event.  That sounds confusing, but it’s really a beautiful idea, and I’ve been lucky enough to experience it a handful of times, and here’s my favorite example.

When I was a kid, I used to have a green Huffy bike that was really heavy and cumbersome.  Some of the other kids had BMX bikes, and they could race around, pop wheelies, and catch air off of ‘sweet jumps’ with ease.  (That’s a Napoleon Dynamite reference, by the way.)

My tank of a bike made such stunts laughably difficult, although they did happen occasionally, albeit with a little help from my friends.  One kid named Sean who lived across the street claimed to have bionic powers.  This was in the late 1970′s, after all, and the Bionic Man TV show was in full swing.  Sean was notorious for claiming the powers whenever he would throw a football for a slightly longer distance than normal, or run extra fast, but his favorite thing was to stand in the middle of his yard and gesture at the two large trees in it.  “I can pick up this tree in this hand,” he would say, “and that tree over there in my other hand.”

“Well, let’s see you do that,” my brother and I said.

He would hold his arms out and flex his fingers before he poked at his wrist and said, “Hunh.  My bionics don’t seem to be working today.”

“Oh, man, that’s a shame,” we said.  “We wanted to see you lift up the trees.  Maybe next time.”

That being said, one day all of us were riding our bikes in circles, jumping off curbs and trying to pop wheelies, and after numerous tries, I finally was able to get the front wheel of my Huffy off the ground at the precise moment it needed to be lifted, and the front wheel sailed into the air.  I kept it aloft for quite some time, and I was elated.  When the wheel found its way back to the ground, I pushed backwards on my pedals, stopped my bike, and shouted with glee.  “Hey, everybody, did you see that?  Oh, man, that was super high!”  Most people cheered and said that yes, they’d seen it, but Sean was having none of it.

“Did you see me go like THIS right before you pulled up on the handlebars?” he asked, making a sort of throwing motion with his arm.

The rest of us kinda looked at each other, and I said, “Uh, no, I didn’t see that.”

“Oh, well, I transferred my bionics to you, and that’s what gave you the strength to do that.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, trying not to laugh.  “Thanks!”

After much cajoling of my parents, I finally got a new bike when I was about nine years old.  I’d been looking at it for months in a catalog I’d gotten from the Schwinn store.  It was a Tornado, and it was love at first sight.

I don’t remember exactly when I got it, whether it was for my birthday or For No Reason, but I loved it, and I rode it everywhere.  It was quite an improvement over the clunky Huffy.  Suddenly jumps and wheelies were no problem, and I could skid around the slippery sidewalks at CatholicSchool like a pro.  A handful of us clipped playing cards into the spokes of our wheels with clothespins, in order to make our bikes sound like hot rods.  Incidentally, I think it may be time to clip a card or two into the wheels of my new bike and race around the neighborhood, just to see what kind of a reaction I get.

In true BFS&T fashion, I told you that story so that I can tell you this one, and this is where the synchronicity factors in.

One day, my brother and I were playing football in the front yard, like we did often.  On this particular day, we were in full uniform, with pants, jerseys (he wore a Seattle Seahawks jersey, while I was partial to the Pittsburgh Steelers), knee pads, shin guards, shoulder pads, and helmets.  We were quite well decked out, I have to say.  So we’d been playing for a while that afternoon, when I got the sudden urge to ride my bike.  Normally I would have gone inside to change out of my football uniform first, but this time I chose to climb on my Tornado and zoom away in full regalia.  I thought I should just leave my helmet and everything on; I’m not sure why.

I had been riding for fifteen or twenty minutes, when the thought occurred to me, Why didn’t I take all this stuff off?  I must look like a complete idiot.  I’m going home right now and changing. About one second after I had finished that thought and turned toward home, my handlebars slipped ninety degrees sideways, and my bike fell to the ground.  I flew through the air for a couple of seconds, flipped over onto my back, and my head slammed down onto the cement sidewalk much harder than it had any right to.

I lay there dazed, looking up at the sky, completely unhurt.  I suddenly realized how glad I was that I’d chosen not to change out of my football helmet, and I rode home with newfound vigor.  I don’t think I told my mom what happened, because I didn’t want her to worry.  Nothing had happened to me, after all, so why bother her with a non-issue?  But I never forgot, and I got a bike helmet pretty soon after that incident.

By way of a summary for this entry, here’s a video of the Police, tearing it up in 1984 (I’m guessing it’s 1984 by what they’re wearing), when they were at the absolute top of their game.  This, naturally, is the song, “Synchronicity I.”

Here’s another story from the TMI Files, and it’s quite possibly the most. . .um. . .risque of the bunch of stories.  If that’s not something you feel comfortable reading, or if you’re at work, I encourage you to skip over the next few paragraphs and start reading again at the fifteenth paragraph, which is a good bit and takes place on Halloween.

Like I’ve said in the last couple of these stories, there’s a certain age during which young kids are curious about nudity and romantic feelings, but it only lasts for a certain amount of time before puberty happens and changes everything.  The last of these of ‘innocent’ experiences for me was when I was ten years old, and it naturally involved GirlUpTheStreet, who will henceforth be known as WonderWoman.

At the end of our street in Yakima was (and still is) a fairly good-sized Catholic school and church.  Next to that is a fairly good-sized lawn and baseball field, and next to THAT is a fairly good-sized football stadium, with fairly good-sized bleachers.  All of us kids spent countless hours around the school, though none of us went there.  They had a large log toy on the playground, and the school’s sidewalks were paved with smooth and slippery cement, which made for some excellent bike riding and skidding around all of the corners.  Another of our favorite endeavors was to sneak underneath the chain-link fence and into the stadium, day or night.  Sometimes we would play football, sometimes we’d play hide-and-seek, sometimes we’d just roam around.  This isn’t the interesting part of the story yet, and it’s also not the location of my final innocent tryst with WonderWoman.

I told you about the school and the stadium because A) it’s such a huge part of the setting for our neighborhood stories, and B) there was a network of fruit warehouses to the south and to the east of the stadium.  The one to the south (which has since been divided up and developed into Glenwood Square) is where my brother and dad and I witnessed a Volkswagen Bug stall on the train tracks and nearly get crushed, but the one to the east is the one in which FinalInnocentTryst occurred.

During the day, the warehouse was a hive of activity, and none of us was brave enough to speak to any of the ragged, scruffy men who worked there.  After hours, the place was full of great places for kids to play.  There were countless fences to climb under, and boxes of fruit to throw at each other, and large wooden pallot boxes to hide in.  The boxes became our favorite places, because not only could we hide, we could also see through the cracks of the boxes to see if anyone was coming.

Late one afternoon, WonderWoman and I decided we wanted to go to the warehouse and check it out, since it was a weekend and there was nothing going on over there.  We climbed under the fence and walked through the warehouse.  We’d been there many times with the whole group of kids, and each of us had gone separately a million times, but this was our first time going there together.  We’d been holding hands palm-to-palm the way ten-year-old kids do, without the fingers interlaced.  Suddenly we heard a noise and a door opened at the far end of the warehouse, letting a sliver of daylight into the dark warehouse.  This can’t be happening, we thought. There’s never anyone around on weekends.

Two men came through the door, and our hearts leapt into our throats.  We ran toward the door at our end of the warehouse, pushed the door out and sprinted toward freedom.  The men heard our footfalls and yelled, “Hey, you kids get outta here!”  They turned and started to chase us out.

The gate was too far away, and we knew we’d never be able to squirm under it before the men caught us, so we ran to one of the pallot boxes and jumped inside.  Breathing heavily from our sprint, we peered through the cracks in the box and saw the men come out the door and half-heartedly search for us.  They were about thirty feet from us, and they had no idea we were there.  We didn’t want our loud breathing to give away our hiding place, so we kissed.  A lot.  Even after the men went away.  We decided that we quite enjoyed being trapped in there.

“Here, let’s do something else,” she said in her let’s-pretend-we’re-married voice.  She slid her pants down to her knees and motioned for me to do the same.  Having done that, we sat down next to each other, close enough that our posteriors were touching, and kissed some more.  This was a whole new level for both of us, since we hadn’t ever really kissed before, and certainly not like that.  She rose up to her knees and said, “Let’s touch.”

“Okay,” I said, and rose up to my knees in front of her.  We were kneeling a baby’s arm-length from each other with our pants down.  We kissed again, quickly, just once, and she reached out to touch the tip of my penis with her first two fingers.  She kept them there, ever so gently, and was fascinated to watch tumescence in action.  She moved her index finger from the tip to the base, and back to the tip.  Now it was my turn.  There was a line on the skin of her lower abdomen from the elastic at the top of her underwear.  I touched that line, and slid my finger slowly down.  I didn’t put it inside her, because that wasn’t something that we would have done at that time.  I just touched her gently from top to bottom to top, in the same way that she had done to me.

By this time, it was starting to get dark outside, and we thought we should get back home.  We gave each other one last long kiss and, still kneeling, embraced and pulled our bodies together.  Neither of us had experienced anything that magical before, and we held each other there for a very long moment.  Afterwards, we stood, pulled our pants back up and found our way to a new place where the gate was unlocked, so we just walked right through and out to the street toward home.

We had our pants pulled up, but unzipped slightly, so that they’d stay up, but we still had the feeling of intimacy that it created.  We were holding hands in that non-interlocked way again, until she found a discarded piece of garden hose in someone’s yard, picked it up, and started blowing into it like a trumpet.  Suddenly we we saw a couple of the neighborhood kids at the end of our street.  They saw us, too, and started running in our direction.   I quickly zipped my pants up.  “Your pants,” I said, “Get your pants!”  She laughed, dropped the hose and reached for the zipper on her pants.  She had a bit of difficulty, but got them zipped just as the kids arrived.

“What’re you guys doing?” they asked.

“Nothing,” we said, giving each other Significant Looks.  All of us walked home together, and I don’t think any of the other kids was the wiser.

WonderWoman moved from my neighborhood not long after that, and she went to a different school, so I didn’t see her again until Halloween of the following year, by which time I was eleven and she was ten.  She and her older brother came by our neighborhood to trick-or-treat and say hi to everybody.  They arrived a bit late, maybe ten o’clock at night, and my brother and I were already practically asleep in our bunk beds.  My mom let them in and got us up to say hello, cause she knew we’d be disappointed if we missed them.

My brother got up first and went in to say hi.  I straightened up my Oakland Raiders pajamas and walked out a minute later.  We exchanged the usual pleasantries and good-to-see-yous, but after a while it got a bit awkward.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe it was just because we all hadn’t seen each other for such a long time, or maybe it was so late at night that we were all a little groggy, but we gave them some candy and said thanks-for-coming-by-and-stuff, and they went on their way again.

I turned back to walk into the bedroom, and that’s when I noticed that the fly on my pajamas was open, and that the tip of my little penis was poking out, and it had been out the entire time.  It was as if it, too, was saying hello to the girl it missed.  I smiled to myself, tucked it back into my fly, and crawled into bed.

That’s the last time I saw her.

Sometimes, I wonder what became of her.  I’m sure she’s old and fat and married with kids now, like so many other people our age are, but I’ll never forget her as she was back then, and I’ll never forget some of the moments we shared.  They’re still imprinted in my brain, and that stuff happened over three decades ago.

Love, it would seem, conquers all; even such seemingly insurmountable forces as time and an otherwise rapidly fading memory.