Glad to see you following me on Substack

I recently (last week) spent an ENTIRE WEEK in the immediate company of Miss Kelly, my heart, my love, the one who got away from me in high school.

She got away because, for the most part, I wasn't her guy. Not yet, anyway. Not then. I was okay, she guessed, and she would talk to me about stuff she didn't tell other people, but her life was fraught with activity and adventure and I was mostly a squirrelly kid, afraid of his own shadow, hiding away from the real world in books.

"You never smiled," she says now and again, thinking of how I was forty years ago.

I smile, now, a lot.

Anyway, I ramble. The week we spent together was in lieu of my going to MileHiCon and her working for a week. My original intent was to visit the NC family manse (think: cabin in the woods, with heat!) to see the leaves change, to have a birthday dinner at The Dillard House in north Georgia, and to grab even more moments of our roughly parallel lives TOGETHER, you know, as lovers do, lovers who share weekends (we do not).

During that trip I realized that the videos on YouTube showing slot-machine enthusiasts are all blatant lies and I stared in horror at the shiny, booping, glittering machine that swallowed HUNDREDS of my dollars without so much as a reach-around, slot-machine-wise.

Miss Kelly whittled away at a hundred bucks for HOURS, cleverly losing it at a steady rate until it was time to drive back to the cabin, and we both watched Georgia stomp the Florida gators in a game where we both had voted for the underdog (Florida, and MORE money lost foolishly).

We talked. A LOT. About future dreams. About "how did WE get HERE?" About how we were, back in high school, with dramatically different lives, with dramatically different lifestyles, philosophies, viewpoints, and hopes.

About how we are both weird, how our weirdnesses don't seem to bother the other, and what might retirement look like for each of us? Can we FIND a retirement that overlaps? I'm all for a house in the woods, far from people, surrounded by dogs, a nearby stream, a wraparound porch, and high-speed WIFI. To write, perchance to craft literary dreams that spirit readers away and they gather unto me like a flock of fans, but not, you know, NEXT to me.

They know to leave me be in my cabin, surrounded by dogs, the gentle sound of flowing water uninterrupted by their screeching adoration.

Miss Kelly wants to travel, to see things she's never seen, in places she's never been, via a "bucket list" which, for some reason, involves the harming of NO actual buckets. She wants me along for the ride, for the most part, despite my own desires.

A recreational vehicle, she wants, and we cannot agree on what that vehicle might be. She likes the teardrops with a bed and little else, to be pulled behind something. I want a converted bus, with a full kitchen, a shower AND a tub, room for dogs (you knew that was coming) and bookshelves. One you drive.

So, even as we find solace and comfort in each other's company, there is the ongoing WEIRDNESS that we both have, that we share, which pulls us apart.

Finding these gaps in our worldviews, even after all these years, is a healthy conversational topic as we navigate our upcoming senescence and the twilight of our lives.

In moments of silence, interrupted by the almost-constant hissing of falling leaves striking their brethren on the forest floor behind the cabin, we reflected that we are, indeed, fortunate and lucky to have one another in these later stages of life, mostly healthy, mostly with our capacities intact, mostly able to do the things we could do when we were younger.

Mostly.

"You don't mind my oddness," she says, into the silence, and I nod, knowing she knows I'm nodding.

"Worse, I cherish it. You're so uniquely you that I know I'll never find another person who is like you, even in the slightest. It gives me great comfort to be your guy," I reply. "Even if you are weird."

She smiles at me, and that smile would melt the blackest of souls.

Then I saw this, today, and wanted to share it with her.

You, reading this? You were just along for the ride.

And I'm glad you're here.