Batchelor Daze..

Twice a week, 127 pre-teen boys flooded through the double glass doors smelling of sweat, sugar syrup, and dirty laundry. As soon as school was over, they came to turn in their collections from the days prior. Uninvited, they would dump the contents of their pockets onto my desk. Piles of sticky change mixed with Bazooka gum wrappers, rubber bands, bottle tops, lint balls… One boy had a large, very dead, dung beetle that I particularly admired.

After the counting, sorting and applying of credit, pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters all got stacked into paper rolls that I’d walk down to the plaza at Lake Anne and deposit at our bank with Mrs. Worsham at the window. Her boy was one of my boys. Once the chaos of the kids had died down, I would update the “boards” to indicate who sold what and how many papers they should get on their next delivery. It was always a tricky balance between having enough to go around and avoiding waste.

I finished with college, had my English/Psychology degree in hand, and was well qualified to be in charge of newspaper circulation, or pretty much any other job that required no specific skills whatsoever. But it was all good with me. I was loving life, sharing a four story town-home on the lake that was only five minutes away with three other bachelors.

We were all in our late twenties, and lived to party.

The guys had girlfriends who had their own places. No live-in girls allowed. Most of the girls had dogs and could cook, so after work was over, we convened at our place for a daily celebration of …a daily celebration. Music, food, beer, dogs, doobies…what, me worry? On sunny days the party was down at the lake with multiple rafts and inner tubes strapped together into a flotilla of fun. The boom box and cooler had their own central raft, the joints a waterproof container.

The party lasted four years.

Then Carla got a job with the paper doing classified adds. She was only 20, and cute as hell. Bright, articulate, unguarded, innocent. A Catholic girl. My ex-girlfriend and I had broken up. We each had a fling with people we didn’t care about, got back together for a week and accused each other of bringing crabs into the relationship, and yes Mrs. Doubtfire, I don’t mean Dungeness.

None of it mattered anymore. Carla was everything I wasn’t and I was hopelessly mesmerized. There was never a choice. I had to have her, be with her, spend long hours talking, and then letter writing when I went off to grad school.

She lived a stream-of-consciousness life, always in the moment. I was a planner, knowing what I would do, when and how. She had no embarrassment button. I cared to much about what others thought. Carla was up for anything, just jumping in the car without asking where we were going. Let’s just go.

She was frustrating and charming, and never, ever boring.

That was 42 years, two daughters, and seven houses ago. This morning she finally came to bed around 4am after being up all night as is her norm. We got close, talked a bit, me waking, her fading. Polar opposites. 

I as crazy about her now as much as I was back then. Probably more.

I love my life, always have, but I sure wouldn’t mind a little of that party time flashback in a townhouse by a lake so many years ago...with Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Brown singing just for us.