When I was growing up, there was the annual ritual of buying school supplies. They included the typical things such as pencils and papers. The big buy, however, was the binder. Each year we got one because they only lasted a year. They actually lasted less than a year, but we made do with the misaligned claws and torn pockets because we couldn’t convince our parents to buy a new one in March. And we didn’t want to. By that time we usually got attached to it. It was the one school supply that was also a fashion statement. I can’t remember what the girls got as they did not yet exist to me until about the fourth grade, but the boys would get He-Man or Thundercats or Batman or something like it and it defined us.

In the fourth grade, I had a teacher named Mrs. Nelson that I had such a crush on that I faked bad vision in order to get attention from her. Just about all the boys had crushes on her. Best. Behaved. Class. Ever.

Anyhow, that year my binder fell apart before the fall semester was even over. I probably could have convinced Mom to get me a new one, but either I feared I would get in trouble or I decided to get creative. So what I did was take all of the binders from years past, take some duct tape to them, and create the Mega-Binder. Actually, I created two because I had so many. I gave the second to my neighbor and periodic friend Toby Crowell. He was as excited as I was about having the two biggest binders in school.

We showed the binders to everybody in sight and they all thought it was pretty cool. At least the boys did, and their opinions were the one that counted. At some point a couple days in I showed Mrs. Nelson. Normally one of the nicest, kindest, warmest teachers I ever had… she blew a gasket. Before I knew it she was screaming at me in front of the whole class about how of course she had noticed it and had been biting her tongue but if I really wanted to know what she thought about it she thought that it was an absolutely grotesque example of our wasteful consumer society and of class inequality where some boys would buy five binders and tear them apart while there were young boys in this country that couldn’t even afford one good binder.

I didn’t really understand what the inequality between our elementary school classes had much to do with anything and as far as I knew everybody could afford school supplies. I didn’t really understand what she was talking about at all except for that she was obviously real mad about something some class was doing wrong. What I really didn’t understand was that she didn’t understand that they were used and otherwise discarded binders save for the fact that I couldn’t bear to throw anything away because it seemed so wasteful. Not able to understand much of anything, I just tried not to cry. I can’t recall how successful I was or was not.

The binder never saw the light of day again. Toby had heard what happened and he threw his out. I couldn’t, though. It seemed wasteful.

One of my earliest crushes was to a girl named Clementine Giovanni. Clementine was a tall, slender girl that was really pretty for a fifth grader in the eyes of a fifth grader. She was the first girl I ever asked to “go with me” and, of course, the first girl to shoot me down.

Mom, ever-present and all-knowing, knew about all of this despite my never having told her. I know that she knows because she would tell other people about it. This girl that I had a crush on that {in Mom’s mocking tone} didn’t even know [I] was alive! Fortunately, she didn’t tell people of this until I was well good and past it. Even so, I felt the need to object.

“Mau-aummmm… she knew I was alive. She just didn’t care…”

That was an exaggeration. She knew I was alive and moreso than any of the other rejections I got before I ever got a yes, she was really nice about it. I made it kinda easy on her, slipping a note into her desk and accepting, without confrontation the little note that she wrote back. I didn’t even ask if she would go out with me when she was no longer going out with the guy she was going out with, even though that was a standard question at the time. Not sure we talked after that. Not sure we talked before that. I was that kind of nerd. The only girl I could easily talk to was one that I didn’t find very cute and girl classmates whose moms were friends with my mom. My Mom didn’t know Clementine’s parents very well, which of course made Mom’s ability to know everything all the more eerie.

The guy that she was going out with at the time was a dude named Grick. Grick actually confronted me about it, though not in a very confrontational way. I don’t think they lasted long. He was kind of a nerd himself. We would later be on friendly terms and probably would have been friends if we’d had any classes together. He was the closest thing I had to a friend on my junior high basketball team because we were collectively the non-jock jocks. Clementine herself went on to be quite popular, quite beautiful, and on drill team.

Clementine added me as a friend on Facebook not long after I joined up. She looks almost exactly the same now as she did in high school, which come to think of it is very close to how she looked in elementary school. She has one of those faces and a featureless figure. I was surprised to see that she wasn’t married because she struck me as the type to be married shortly after college. She’s engaged now. Anyway, part of me wants to print out a copy of the friend invitation and send it to Mom.

“See. I told you so!”

My first close friend of the female persuasion was Andrea Carmine. It was sort of an accident how I became friends with her. Well, it asn’t an accident at all. It was a failed attempt at manipulation.

We were in the same theater class and I developed a crush on her friend Charlene Kopfer. Charlene was tied to Andrea at the hip. Andrea was pretty outgoing and we had a connection in that we both knew a girl named Patty Charles. so I befriended Andrea to get access to Charlene.

Does that ever work? Not for me.

Andrea and I had a surprising amount of chemistry. Her outgoingness and my reservedness complemented one another quite well. It didn’t take long for rumors to start. Almost entirely among people that didn’t like people like us.

When we had to pair off for duets in theater class, I was of course hoping to be paired off with Charlene. However, since she I had yet to get past Andrea to her, it Charlene ended up partnered with Janet, another girl to sort of join our group of four. Andrea and I were spectacular together, earning the only standing ovation from the teacher.

This is unrelated to most of the story, but there was a case where the four of us were going to rehearse outside of school at Charlene’s house. Charlene’s mother was very protective and was uncomfortable with her having “a boy” over (even if there were going to be three girls). Charlene comforted her mother by saying that I was a conservatively dressed kid that drove a minivan for goodness sakes. Mrs. Kopfer was convinced.

At the time, I had longish hair. I’m not sure that Charlene knew this because because I typically saw her in the morning when it was wetted down. And even outside of the mornings, I typically kept it close to my head and tucked away. And while I did drive a minivan to school and to a lot of other places, that was because my folks were uncomfortable with leaving our convertible in a parking lot. On weekends, though, I generally drove the convertible. I have sensitive eyes, so I typically wear sunglasses. And I have a leather jacket. And when I drive the convertible, my otherwise well-placed partially-long hair gets pretty wildly disordered. So when I showed up at their doorstep, Mrs. Kopfer saw a tall, wild-haired hooligan with a leather jacket and sunglasses hop out of a convertible. Charlene was pretty upset with me, which was the most emotion I’d gotten out of her at that point.

Then came the next round of duets and this time I got partnered off with Charlene. It was a disaster. Charlene was completely uninterested in rehearsing at all. She was uninterested in doing much of anything except talking to Andrea and Janet. That she was romantically uninterested in me would be an understatement.

That was fine, though, because my interest in her was dwindling, too. She was quite immature, still hovering a junior high mentality. She never learned her lines and when we finally did our presentation I had to feed her almost every line. She got a “C” for failing to remember her lines. I got a “B-” for failing to feed her the lines with sufficient subtlety.

Unattracted to Andrea and feeling a particular contempt for Charlene, I eventually asked out Janet. She somewhat graciously declined.

On the Camelot BBS I came to sorta know a girl who went by the name Whirlwind. I was a poor friend to her brother and a good fake son to her mother. For some reason (I can think of a few), she just didn’t like me (even in that brotherly way I had come to fear and expect). Without much choice, I chose not to like her, either. She dated my friend Clint for a spell as well as another friend whose online name was Cladger. Cladger was one of those guys that I always wanted to be friends with because he was a great guy on paper but he was a little too much of a sycophant in reality.

Cladger called me up one day and said that there was something that I had to get in on. What? He wouldn’t say. He needed a ride to Southfield Mall, though. Oh, and he’d be bringing a couple other guys, Kermit (whom I knew) and Nathan (whose handle, “Nathan”, I’d seen online, but whom I’d never talked to). I picked up Cladger first so that he could guide me to Kermit’s house, where Kermit and Nathan would be. As I drove, I quizzed him on what exactly was going on. He said that Whirlwind and Nathan had struck up a little online romance and that they were going to meet.

Seeing as how everyone seemed to be having better romantic luck than I was, I didn’t know why in the world he thought this would be something that I would want to see. “You brought me here to chaperon Whirlwind meeting some guy?”

“No, I brought you a front row seat. You’re going to want to see this.”

The second that I saw Nathan, I said three words to Cladger: Oh, wow, and thanks.

It wasn’t just that Nathan was obese – I’d seen heavier. It was the slimy, repellent nature of his obesity that was truly astonishing. His skin looked like it was struggling to keep the fat inside of it like a pillowcase holding four pillows and about to burst at the seam. His elbows were hidden under a rag of peachy fat. He had no neck, which you almost didn’t notice except that when he looked down what he had of a chin immediately became buried in fat. Had his face been covered end-to-end in acne, it wouldn’t have looked any worse than the pin-sized pores on his face barely visible through a waterfall of sweat.

Whirlwind had declared herself too good for Cladger. She had declared herself too good for my best friend. She had declared herself too good to be even the most casual of friends with me. I cannot presently recall where I was on my weight rollercoaster at this time, but I am pretty sure that I was significantly below my peak and, while perhaps not desirable to most, not repellant. Not like Nathan. How in the world was she going to respond to this guy meeting her at a mall?!

After the girls were running half an hour or so late, we decided that maybe we hadn’t communicated where it was that we were supposed to meet, so we started walking around the mall. And walking, and walking. After about half an hour we did stumble upon them. They politely waved and said hello, but never stopped walking. They acted as though it was a coincidence that we happened to see each other. As though there hadn’t been plans. As though she hadn’t spent the previous week spilling her guts to a guy that had hooked a ride to the mall to meet her. It was enough that I began to wonder if Cladger had misrepresented the nature of the meeting.

“That’s weird,” Nathan said, “I thought we were supposed to hang out.” It was only when he said that when the obvious occurred to me. Of course they were here to meet him. Upon seeing him, meeting him was the last thing that they wanted to do. It was a real let down compared to the show that I was hoping to see, but the idea of all the icks she must have been feeling over the span of weeks would have to be reward enough.

“Maybe they didn’t recognize us, Nathan,” Cladger said, ignoring the fact that he and Whirlwind had dated. “How did you describe yourself?”

“5’8, brown hair. Glasses. Kind of overweight, but I work out.”

I found that hard to believe.

Nathan was ultimately unphased, even when she hid from him immediately after the meeting. He made his way to a couple of Camelot parties afterwards and almost singlehandedly ruined them due to his very unpleasant odor and appearance. The smell was easy enough to avoid in the mall because it was a very open atmosphere. It was much harder at Excalibur’s house and so when he entered a room, people would find a reason to disperse until we eventually all ended up outside in the insane Gulf Coast summer heat because it was so much easier to spread out and shift as the winds carrying the odors requested.

Though he may have never knew how badly he smelled, he must have known that there was something putting everybody off. He tried to make up for it by talking as though he hadn’t been the reject all of his life that Tom confirmed he was. He spoke vaguely of an ex-girlfriend, described himself as “bi-curious” as it was considered cool and edgy to be at the time. Over and over again he tried to present himself as alternative. As many of our peers reasoned, if you can’t be better, try to be different. Really, though, it had the equivalent effect of putting on heavy cologne to cover up the smell of cigarettes: even it wasn’t quite as odious, it was twice as strong and even more unpleasant, on the whole.

I discussed the hellish experience that was junior high, where I had to bribe people to leave me alone or act friendly. Things had improved by the 8th grade (the last year of middle school in Delosa), but I was too guarded and defensive to see it. Then I got dropped into high school…

Once again, I was graduating from the little school merging with the big school. Mayne Intermediate had been about twice the size of Larkhill Intermediate. The existence of Airfield (a middle school created my 8th grade year that took some students from Mayne and Larkhill middle schools) didn’t factor in that much because most connections remained strong with the school that they came from. But this time it wasn’t so bad. The chaotic and brutal culture of Larkhill was largely non-existent. The bullies that tormented us couldn’t get the same mileage out of being a thug that they used to. Plus, more and more of them were shipped off to the alternative high school.

But perhaps the largest advantage to Mayne High School was its size. It was large enough that I could become invisible. It’s a lot easier to hide amongst a class of a thousand than it is to hide in a class of a couple hundred. And those that were there were less likely to be thugs, less encouraged to be thugs, and older and wiser than they had been. I know I devoted a paragraph to that, but it was worth repeating.

So I crossed the ranks from the Unpopular to the Not Popular. I had a few tormentors, I guess, but there wasn’t anymore physical intimidation and they didn’t have the people egging them on anymore. I would meet the worst of these guys many years later at the Stockpile Saloon. He seemed to remember us as good friends. Weirdest thing. He wasn’t the only one.

The weight also started to come off. Ten pounds one year, ten the next, fifty the year after that. Gradually I started building up a network. A few networks, actually. There were the people I had classes with, people I met on Camelot BBS that went to my high school, and then people that Clint introduced me to.

There were still problems, though. While Clint had integrated himself into the band scene with all sorts of friends and so on, Though Clint was no longer a liability, I still had other friends who were. I remember one girl in particular who stopped sitting with us at breakfast because of Raleigh’s presence. On the other hand, Ralgeigh graduated a year before me and I started becoming less accommodating of people that I didn’t like that were keeping people I did like away from me.

I never found my clique. I was still reasonably insistent on doing my own thing. And just as I started being in a position where I could make a lot of friends from school, I wasn’t really interested in doing so. My social hub was no longer Mayne High School but was instead Camelot. While I was fine with that most of the time, it was frustrating to know a lot of people and yet have nobody to sit with at lunch. I do with I had found my social gumption earlier. I was so scared of being to them what Raleigh was to me.

But still, the situation had at least improved. I never dated anyone that went to Mayne High School, though I did have a couple of opportunities and I’m sure a few more that I was too clueless to pick up on. I had female friends. If I hadn’t had a girlfriend at the time, I would still have had a date to the prom. Somehow, I think that was always the true measure of success: Being Not Raleigh.

I previously discussed my relatively sanguine experiences in elementary school where I was guarded by my parents’ position in the community, some athleticky friends that I played sports with, and so on. Meanwhile, there was an undercurrent of factors that would later come to haunt me. I’d gained weight, become friends with some less popular people, and embraced eccentric parts of my personality that were not conducive to young popularity. I had “graduated” from elementary school with a vague optimism that junior high would be a little better since there would be more people that I would get to know. How very wrong I was.

Junior high is tough in even the best of circumstances. The onset of puberty, for instance. Your own puberty is actually only a fraction of the problem. By far, the bigger problem is all of the aspiring thugs that suddenly have testosterone gushing through their system. The people that left me alone (or were the reason others left me alone) turned on me as they made new friends that they needed to impress.

Unfortunately, ours was one of the smaller schools to feed into our middle school, so we were absorbed into the social structure of Larkhill Elementary. Larkhill was more of a working class sort of place with a lot of kids raised by uneducated boatsmen, mechanics, and things like that. While very far from an inner city school, it was just a more rough-and-tumble place than was West Oak Elementary and Mayne High School would prove to be. Though only about a quarter or a third of Mayne high school was comprised of people fed into by Larkhill, I would say that well over half of the troublemakers were people I knew from junior high.

Aggravating the problems in junior high was that everything that started getting bad in late elementary school was getting worse. My weight was getting worse, Clint was becoming even more of a social liability, and he and I both would continue to go off and do our own things rather than participate in activities that involved other people. Now added to the mix were other friends, though, that were as bad as or often worse than Clint.

But once again, I had my chance. Joining the football team in the seventh grade didn’t help my popularity, but that was partially my own decision. I wasn’t being invited to parties or anything, but the smart kids on the football team were appreciation that I was a lot smarter than a lot of the other kids on the team. And the contingent of bullies-without-girlfriends (the Crabs and Goyles of the world, who are rarely provoked and often feared) seemed ready to adopt me. But in both cases, there was the issue of the kids that I hung out with.

I don’t want any of this to be read as a complaint that Clint (or anybody else) was dragging me down. Clint did come with a cost, but I can seriously say that my friendship with him was worth just about any price. More than anybody but my parents, he helped shape me into who I have become. Though our friendship was rocky at times (mostly my fault because I was agitated at the opportunities it was costing me), it would lay the groundwork for a great friendship and by the time we reach late high school, he was actually my ambassador to Mayne High School – an invaluable asset.

After football ended, I lost whatever chance I might have had. Clint and I were in offseason athletics together and we brought out the social worst in one another. Worse was the presence of Raleigh, a “friend” who was by far a greater liability than Clint ever was. Worse, while Clint was picked on for stupid reasons, Raleigh deserved his unpopularity. But the three of us (and a German exchange student) would hang out off in our corner while the jocks were all playing a game that sort of a mixture between football and rugby. We might as well have painted targets on our back.

You might think that my size would have made me a less likely target. Or at least my height would. But by and large the worst would-be tormentors actually tended to be the smaller kids. Little Napoleons. The good news was that they were the easiest to deal with. If I stood my ground, they did not genuinely have the confidence they depicted that they would be able to take me out. One Napoleon attempted to push me, but I grabbed his hands, pushing them to the side, and spun him to fall onto the ground. Another case he tried to jack my foot (place his foot under mine while jogging and then pull it up to make me tumble) and actually hurt his knees in the process. The bigger kids were less afraid. Never provoking a fight, but giving pants-pulls, wedgies, and body gloves with some regularity.

My luck with the girls was scantly any better. This was actually an area where Clint had notably more success than I did. I was fat and he was scrawny and I was introverted and he was extroverted so he had a few sorta-relationships while I was rejected over and over again by girls I hadn’t the first clue of how to ask out.

Things improved somewhat by the eighth grade. Not only was I one of the oldest kids in the school, but I was also one of the biggest. And no longer in the worst way. I’d sprouted up to about 6′ and though I weighed more than ever, my dimensions mildly improved. Additionally, they had just build Airfield Intermediate School and the student population of Larkhill dropped considerably into something more manageable. It seems that Larkhill had previously been about the worst possible size. Too small to achieve anonymity, too large with too many nemeses to to ever confront them.

Plus, I got smart. Or rather I used my smarts. I discovered this concept called “bribery” and I found it remarkably effective. It actually started out as a profit-motivated endeavor. Compared to a lot of my friends at the time, I had a pretty good work ethic and was relatively smart. I did my homework when they didn’t. For my friends (the ones I liked) I would give them the answers. For people I didn’t like, I would charge them money. I didn’t even need the money. I just wanted it to cost them something so that they wouldn’t ask me to do every little thing for them. Anyway, one of my bullies wanted in on the action. He asked how much I charged. I said “Buy me a coke at lunch and we’re even” (the average rate was $5 for an assignment I’d already done and $10-$20 for one I hadn’t, so he was getting quite the bargain). The money wasn’t as important as the fact that the coke was the ticket to sitting with him at lunch. The guy who was one of my worst same-grade tormentors in the 6th grade actually signed my yearbook in the 8th. He not only became my friend, but he kept other bullies at bay. He introduced me to his friends. I made my first female friend through him.

The other factor was that I joined the basketball team, which was a mixed bag but mostly on the positive. It reconnected me with a whole lot of people that I played YMCA basketball and, though some were the folks that turned on me in the 6th and 7th grade, we worked out way back up to neutral terms.

Unfortunately, by the 8th grade my head was kept so low that I never noticed things were improving. I remember the relief of not being under the constant weight of bullies, but there was no real sense of optimism. I was oblivious to the opportunities that were starting to open up. And I was still clueless how to get along with these entities called “people”. If one of the big advantages of public education over homeschooling is socialization, it’s possibly a mixed lesson.

Different people divide the strata in K-12 society differently. Some people say that there is “the popular” and “the unpopular”. I personally divide people into three categories: the popular, the not popular, and the unpopular. The first group is self-explanatory, the second group consisting of people that simply lack popularity, and the third group consisting of people that are aggressively disregarded. I’ve actually shifted between all three of these groups over the course of my K-12 experience.

When I started out, I was actually in a relatively good social position. I was friends with a neighbor who was a bit of a bully but kept the other bullies at bay for me. My father was known for being a little league coach. My mother was actively involved in PTA and the like and so a lot of people had parents that knew my parents. And I played sports so a lot of kids knew me from that.

It was, alas, not to last. The biggest problem was that I started gaining weight in about the second grade. It was the biggest problem, though oddly it didn’t actually start causing me problems until the others started to surface. The second issue, related to the first, was that I started to sweat a lot. Given that I don’t have a good sense of smell, I didn’t fully appreciate the need to shower and better groom myself.

The third and fourth are also related. I became friends with Clint, who was a social liability. Clint also had an odor problem and was one of the scrawniest kids you ever saw. He also had ADHD (like the serious kind where you jump out of your chair and for no reason start running around the classroom). So there was a little bit of tarnish-by-association involved. But as important as that was that he and I got along so well that we often didn’t need anybody else. So while the other kids were playing kickball or whatever, he and I were off in our own corner doing our own thing. That sort of self-segregation between you and everyone else (except an unpopular cohort) is a pretty poor strategy.

I was really rather oblivious to the whole need to build and maintain relationships. People had always been there and I had my friends and it was never a problem. Until of course it would become one. When I needed people to have my back and realized that there were none there because I hadn’t made the time and effort to try to include myself. This would become a persistent problem, but it was definitely one that started at West Oak Elementary.

I was becoming vaguely aware of it being a problem. By the fifth grade I had noticed some problems occurring and started tut-tutting Clint about getting too animated. “Think of the casual observer,” I’d say. In other words, don’t do anything that someone who happened to be looking in your direction would find inexplicably weird or mock-worthy. Unfortunately, I never took it to the next step which is to get to know people and to maintain those relationships.

In addition to my connections and my parents’ standing in the community, it was also a lot easier where there were fewer students. To know me is, if not to like me, then to at least think that I am an okay guy. In person I am remarkably inoffensive. All of this was enough to carry me through the fifth grade remaining mostly in tact. I wasn’t popular anymore, but I wasn’t unpopular. I wasn’t generally targeted. That would all change when I got to junior high.

Having made a run at Facebook and Twitter, thus far Twitter has been something of a bust but Facebook has taken off like gangbusters. I can see why Mitch and Clancy took such a liking to it. Most of the people that came to mind that I wanted to add were handily available from my email contact list or as a friend of a friend. Those that weren’t (ex-girlfriend Julie, ex-roommates Dennis and Karl) don’t appear to be on the site at all. There was one other person that I was relatively sure would have a presence there that hadn’t popped up yet. It was, in fact, someone I’ve been trying to track down for a couple years now: Tracey Roberts.

Tracey is not someone that I’ve talked about a whole lot, but she played a pretty integral part of my life. Most particularly my romantic life. The first girl (of two) that ever destroyed me. I’ve been wanting to contact her for quite some time now. I’ve scanned through DMV records and googling, but all of this is made more complicated by the fact that her real name isn’t Tracey Roberts but is in fact one of the most common female names in existence within my generation. Googling her name is hopeless. Even trying to put in relevant details about her. All I’ve found through the DMV, voter registration, and zabasearch is her parents address.

So my assumption is that’s probably where she is. When I left Delosa six or so years ago, she lived with her folks. She was talking of moving to Canada with some guy that she met on the Internet. I would be surprised if that came to fruition, though it would explain what I’ve found (or been unable to find) if that’s the case.

Facebook, though, had apparently given me a lead to go on. The site lets you look for people based on not only on name, but also by alma mater. So I stuck in her name and Delosa Western University, the college I associate her with. Numerous people came up. The second looked promising. I took a closer look at the picture and the resemblance was striking. Was it her? I wasn’t sure. Facebook Tracey lived in Charlton, Tennassee. A lot of people move back and forth between Charlton and Colosse, so that wouldn’t be a big surprise, though I figured that if she left Colosse she would be leaving the south. She went to the appropriate university. Same color hair and eyes, though neither of those are uncommon (my wife has them). But something in her smile seemed very familiar. The more I looked at it, the more sure it seemed that I had finally found her. So I shot her an email: “Is this the same former Tracey Roberts of Camelot, Roosevelt High School, DWU, and UDC?”

I wasn’t sure if she would reply or what I would even say if she did. The main reason I was trying to track her down was to apologize. I won’t get precisely into the details of what I have to apologize for, but of the relatively short list of people I mistreated in my life, she is at the the top of it. She is one of only two people that I feel the need to go out of my way to say that I’m sorry. She hurt me badly and to say that I did not respond well was an understatement. I will probably get around to telling the story at some point, but maybe not. I wrote her a long letter a couple years back, but unfortunately it was on a thumb drive that got wiped and I haven’t had the time or energy to write it again. I was planning on writing it, sending it to her parents and asking them to forward it to her wherever she was. The main reason that I hadn’t done so was that I didn’t have a letter ready. And as of writing her the message on Facebook, I still don’t. But I needed to know if I needed to drop everything and write one. So I wanted in anticipation for Facebook Tracey’s confirmation.

Instead, I got a two word message back “No, sorry”.

I looked at the picture and I was dumbfounded. The more I had looked at it previously, the more sure I was that it was her. But I also wanted it to be her. If it was her, she had finally left Colosse as she had long wanted to do. If it was her, she’d lost a little bit of weight (something she was very self-conscious about). If it was her, she was married. If it was her, she had an adorable little girl. If it was her, she had finally escaped the darkness of her previous life and found the happiness that I’d formerly sneeringly (but more recently earnestly) wished upon her.

I’m not convinced that it isn’t her. The physical similarities, regardless of the picture, are too great for me to dismiss it. I’d honestly expected her to be less enthusiastic about my re-inserting myself in her life. I thought that I might not get a reply at all. Doesn’t seem like her to outright lie, though. And the timeline of the move to Charlton seem wrong somehow. I would like to know for sure if it isn’t her so that I can keep on looking. And I would like to know if it is her and if she genuinely doesn’t want to hear from me (or her old life) anymore.

As much as I would like to say my peace, I would respect those wishes. It’s the least I can do.

Evangeline and I had some pretty substantial overlap in our taste in music, but it was never complete. I had recently picked up a country music habit that she couldn’t really embrace and she was further down the “alternative” of alternative rock than I was. After our first split, I became interested in the local country rock scene (think Skynyrd) and she in more R&B-infused pop rock.

We each came into our first round with one favorite band that we both loved and each of us having one that the other had either never heard of or was only vaguely familiar with. On one hand, there was some hesitation on each of our parts to embrace the other’s favorite band. If I embraced the Flaming Wrecks and she didn’t embrace Troy Thomason that meant that any time the two were in town she would get her way and I wouldn’t get mine and vice-versa. And the reasons that she could relate to the Wrecks’ music were the things about her that made me ill-at-ease and vice-versa. Thirdly, it felt like she wasn’t even giving Thomason a chance and I would be darned if I put more effort into liking her music than she put into liking mine!

On the other hand, who doesn’t like to like more music? Other than music snobs, that is, which neither of us were. And I don’t know about her, but I really did want to embrace the Flaming Wrecks because of some mushy desire to understand her more fully and all that (as much as it terrified me). But even that worked against my listening to the band because I felt like I was under a lot of pressure to like them and I couldn’t just enjoy the music. I told myself that was really why I was having trouble. Not because of the pettiness of the previous paragraph and definitely not because I couldn’t relate to what so obviously touched this person that I was so obviously meant to be with.

It naturally follows that as things started falling apart and the pressures I was feeling elsewhere overwhelmed whatever pressures that a band could apply, I came to really enjoy the Wrecks. They became one of my all-time favorite bands for a while. I’ve purchased every CD they’ve put out since more-or-less right after it came out. When they got national airplay and a video on VH1 (or whatever channel it is that actually plays music videos these days) I celebrated. They’re really good.

And for her part, Eva started to actually listen to the Thomason CDs that I was always sure that she was never actually listening to. She started going to Thomason shows just as I had started going to Wrecks shows. With rare exception, we always missed each other. She would drag her ex-boyfriend that absolutely hated me (something to do with my prying her away from him…) so that she wouldn’t be alone at a Troy show. where I might be there and see her. I came close to hiring an escort on one occasion and on another paid for three tickets so that I would have a couple friends go with me to a Wrecks show. In short, we started going to these shows despite one another rather than because of one another.

Secretly, I think we both spent a significant portion of the shows glancing wayward to see if the other person was there. Outwardly hoping they weren’t, inwardly wanting to be invisible so that we might see the other person there but without having to go through the trouble of acknowledging one another’s presence or going to all of the effort not to acknowledge thus.

Meanwhile, close to the beginning of all this there was another band named Kalispell. Kalispell was another local act that originally hailed from Deseret. They were one of the first local country rock acts I got into. I found a website devoted to them. It was better than their official website because it had the lyrics to all of their songs. It was run by a guy that I would a couple years later meet named Rick. He didn’t transcribe the lyrics, though. That chore was done by a medical student across the state by the name of Clancy Himmelreich.

I’d meet her a couple years later, too.

I’ve mentioned before that I wasted a lot of time when I was young watching and re-watching the same episodes of Matlock. Matlock, because it was always on every day and, when we got cable, on several channels every day, remains my greatest time-sink sin. It was never a good program (would that I were raised in The Age of Law & Order!) and… well, it was Matlock. Some people, however, might contest Matlock’s status as the primary timesuck because for a year every day I would watch a show of legendarily shoddy quality. In case you haven’t figured it out yet by the title of this post or the video up above, that show is Small Wonder.

Small Wonder was a program about a little robot girl, VICI (“Vicki”). She was created by her geeky father as a human replica of sorts. Ted, the father (whose name I didn’t even have to look up!), didn’t want to tell his employers about his little project for reasons that I cannot recall. So Vicki was the Lawsons’ little secret. The episodes generally revolved around either the typical hijinx of situation comedy with often a few robot-related things thrown in for good measure. A lot of it involved trying to keep what would have been the greatest techological achievement in mankind up to that point (an achievement still unmatched in the real world) from anyone that might notice little Vicki’s monotone voice, odd behavior, and lack of a bedroom (she “slept” upright in a closet).

To give you an idea of just how much sense the story made, one episode involved around Jamie (whose name I also did not even bother to need to look up), Vicki’s brother, getting impatient with living with the coolest invention ever and not being able to tell anybody when faced with the typical “My dad is cooler than your dad” arguments at school. So Ted tells Jamie that the blender in their kitchen is really a nuclear somethingorother. Jamie thinks this is awesome, but then of course Ted tells him that he can’t tell anybody. Somehow, Jamie doesn’t seem to notice that he is in no better position that he was. Maybe because he tells people anyway (despite being perfectly able to keep Vicki a secret throughout the show). Hilarity ensues when the Lawson’s neighbor (and Ted’s father) gets wind of the blender. Ha, ha.

Another episode (a couple episodes, I think) had a more high-tech clone of Vicki named Vanessa (VICI was short for Voice Input Child Indenticant… no telling what Vanessa could have been short for) who was smarter and more human than Vicki but also more freedom-minded and likely to get herself (and the lawsons) into trouble. There was apparently talk of a Vanessa spinoff.

There was once a Very Special Episode about Jamie’s friend, who is… horror of horrors, a latchkey kid! You may have to reach pretty far back in the recesses of your mind, if you’re old enough, to recall that term. It referred to the poor, poor unfortunate youths who had working parents and had to let themselves in when they got home from school.

I make fun of the show now, but it will always have a place in my heart somewhere between Thundercats and Gilligan’s Island. I used to watch it day in and day out with my best friend Clint. Not over at his house or anything. We’d both be watching it at our own houses and talk about what transpired on the phone. I didn’t have a phone or TV in my bedroom, so I sat on the wooden chair in the kitchen so that I could be on the corded phone and we could discuss this important television program. Ahhh, those were the best days. I never went through a “girls are icky” phase like a lot of boys did, so Vicki was always cute even though I did not yet know what was meant to be done in response to that cuteness (though some say that Vicki was TV’s first lesbian! Then again, on the show the girl was a robot, so I shouldn’t go there anyway. Notably, the actress found Jesus and appeared on The 700 Club at some point).

Below are some clips. If you’ve never seen the show or want to get a blast from the past if you have, you can get a pretty good feel in the first minute or so of each clip.

-{This blast from the past courtesy of BoingBoing}-