Excuse Me, You Look Familiar

 

When I got done with high school, I applied to the local Junior College and was accepted.  I started classes there in September, when I was just 18 years old.  It was my first time living alone away from the family. That was the real beginning of my life, I swear. 

I have freedom. I come and go as I wish, and I think is prudent.  My classes are basic distribution and of course the art classes. We do a lot of drawing on big sheets of cheap newsprint.  I would prefer to do finished work, but my main instructor wants us to do this. Ugh. OK.

I live with several nursing students.  Mine is a little cold backroom in the house they seem to have rented officially.  There is a plastic sheet on the bed under the sheet sheet.  Cold and crinkly.  Actually, it’s a damp situation. We don’t socialize much.  One of them has a sister who is married.  This husband keeps trying to take me out.  I suspect I am not well thought of for this reason.  Jeez.  I don’t go! He drives heavy equipment for a job, and he keeps inviting me to come out and see his heavy equipment. Mhm. Yeah. Well, my radio is my friend.  I call in to the station and make requests.

These girls are going to work in medicine, right?  Guess who has the guts to cut up a chicken here.  Yeah.  Art student.

I walk from the house down to the college.  It’s a sleepy, boring little city. We have lumber, we have fish boats, we have all the little stores and cafés downtown. 

 

We bought this place because our daughter got divorced and with two children, she needed a place to live with them.

We had been living outside of town on the reservation, on the bay, for over twenty years.

If this were a fine house, its age would make it historical. But it is not a fine house.  It’s a relic of the old days.  The first part was built in 1908, then, they kept adding to it.  First the second story, then someone picked it up and built a basement under it. Next, they enclosed the back porch, then added another enclosed back porch.  Someone made the pantry into a bathroom when they plumbed the house.  My old neighbor next door says that a stream used to run across the backyard, but all the water runs through city sewers now. It’s so old that they had an outhouse somewhere out there in the backyard and they must have used kerosene lamps for light.  It has been wired twice.  Both sets of electrical wires are old and probably not up to code.

There is one pear tree.  I would like to do more container gardening.

 

I got started drinking coffee here.  My teacher and a couple of us go to a local coffee shop just off campus, and we sit there and bs for an hour, he buys me coffee, then we all go back to school.  We are so cool.

I had this same art teacher in high school. I have known him since I was about 16 years old.  He thinks I am a genius.  I sure hope he is right.

He has never made a pass at me.  Either I am not his type, or he thinks I am his kid.  He does get to know girl students socially. 

 

Our daughter’s children are grown now.  Time passes relentlessly.  Things that loomed large and difficult vanish and new things come to your attention.  Now we have young adults and their difficulties.  They have different troubles from what we used to have.  Now their little love relationships are so complicated.  The world impinges on it all.  Now things happen that we would have never dreamed of. At the time of our youth, having a reasonable job would pretty much take care of basic needs.  It wasn’t that hard.  College classes were not all that expensive.  You could take classes and become a nurse or teacher or whatever.  It wasn’t that hard.

 

This is my second year here at the college.  There is a boy here who graduated a year after I did.  We are friends, but he seems awfully young. He likes to hang around the art department, but he does not take classes here.  We talk.  He seems to be a bit of a pack rat.  He collects stuff.  Maybe he is a jackdaw! lol

I basically own the art department.  It is my world, and I am probably the head student, if you ask me. Ha. No one does what I do.  So there!

My music?  Let me see.  Obviously, Dylan.  I listen to the Doors a lot.  I like Cream.  I don’t buy Beatles albums, but I still hear a lot of that.  I don’t pay much attention to the Stones. If there was a sound of my life it would probably be Disraeli Gears.  I hate the junk my high school girl buddy listens to.  The Association?  She listens to something called John Davidson, I think? What?  She is so conventional, but we stay friends.

I was downtown yesterday walking back from the stationery store where I can buy paints.  I bought a pad of drawing paper that was so big and heavy that I decided to carry it on my head.  I was just getting good at it when I saw a lady.  She was getting old, but not quite.  She looked sharp and had these bright blue eyes. She was sitting in her parked car and seemed to be looking at me for some reason. I wonder why. She almost looked like someone I might have known sometime. She reminded me a little of my grandmother.

 

So, I’m parked on the main street in town by the stationery store and a girl is walking by with a big tablet of paper balanced on her head!  She is about 5’8”, with intense blue eyes, long brown hair, sturdy but not too much so and she is wearing paint spotted clothing.  Jeans, man’s shirt, and she wears sandals. Before she trots off down the sidewalk, calling attention to herself with the pad balanced on her head she looks at me for a quick second.  Now, she looks a lot like one of my daughters. Where have I seen her before?

Halfway down the block she stops and looks back with a question in her eyes.