We’re Not From Here

We had visitors from Nebraska this weekend: my college roommate and high school friend Spencer and his wife Maria. We packed a lot of Oregon into four days (beach, wine country, Pearl district, Powell's bookstore) but it was nice to have a diversion from the constant chaos that is our life these days. I took a long weekend from work so I wasn't distracted by that, either.

Coincidentally, another of our roommates, Scott, was in town for OSCON. So we had an impromptu reunion last night...literally the first time the four roommates (Spencer, Scott, my brother and myself) had been all in one place since 1993. During my senior year, we shared a house near 23rd and Vine, between a lumberyard and an abandoned junior high school. Conversation turned, as it will in such circumstances, to girls we knew, parties we concocted, misadventures we'd embarked upon. At one point, we were trying to recall the details of a particular party we attended and I realized that many of them had glided together into a smelly blur. So many things happened to me in those twelve months, so much of my final adult personality ossified. It was as if six or eight years happened in the one year between 1992 and 1994. When I reflect on the past four years (since my divorce), I have trouble remembering if a thing happened in 2003 or 2005. It's not that the very recent past hasn't been eventful (!), but I think it's a matter of my mental template. I'm refinishing furniture I purchased about 15 years ago.

I had an employer in North Dakota (a guy about 40 years old, I suppose; I was 21 or 22 at the time) who said his self-image kind of froze at age 22, and that seems about right. Not quite right, but about right. I'm still surprised by the old guy I see when I look in the mirror, for example.