Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts
By Alyce Wilson
This morning, I was thinking about where I was two years ago, on 9/11. I was at the museum where I used to work, which has, incidentally, figured more prominently in my nightmares than 9/11 itself.
I heard about the first plane crash from a coworker who had friends in New York. They'd called her minutes after it happened. We rushed downstairs to the meeting room, where we could see it on the big TV. We saw the second plane hit.
At this point, the chairman of the museum found it relevant to announce to everyone, "I told you there'd be a war between the Muslim nations and the Christian nations." Everybody glared at him. He couldn't understand why we wanted to go home, even though we were working only a block away from the Liberty Bell and didn't know what was coming next.
But he relented and I was soon on an overcrowded train which, as it pulled in at the business district and all the people in their fine suits got on, quietly, I couldn't help thinking how closely they resembled the ash-covered New Yorkers we'd just seen on TV.
I spent the rest of the day glued to NBC News, my hands covered in newsprint. I was going through stacks of newspapers I'd saved from my days as a small town journalist. My legs fell asleep as I sat there, cross-legged, cutting and labeling and putting articles in folders, an absolutely numb zombie.
So some friends of mine this morning, on a bulletin board, started out with the "Where were you?" discussion and decided it was far more interesting to talk about where we had met each other, where we had met our friends.
I met most of these friends through the Penn State Monty Python Society, which I had discovered after seeing a flyer on campus while at an Amnesty International meeting. As a freshman, I was a member of just about everything you could image, including a libertarian organization. It makes me wonder what would ever happen if I'd run for, say, governor of California. I don't think it would explain things to say, "I joined because there was a cute guy in the club." He was, too. Totally punked out. Gold hoop earring. Later discovered he was gay. Natch.
Given that The Gryphon and I have been talking about High Fidelity lately — terrific movie, John Cusak is a god — I've decided to come up with a list of:
Top
Five Ways I've Met a Friend
(two of them involving bananas, two involving autographs)
5. Mike, a.k.a. Mustache Man, a.k.a. MacGuyver.
Mike was not the most popular kid in school because he was far too brilliant. He annoyed them by fixing physics experiments with chewing gum, that sort of thing. He was also Greek, and his mustache grew in at age 11. Hence, his two nicknames.
The setting: High School Calculus Class. The class was too small for all the students who were registered, so the teacher paired up the desks and told us to choose our desk buddies. I had arranged to sit with this girl Susan, but she decided at the last minute that she'd rather try to convince this guy Mark to take her to the prom, so she chose him instead of me. I had no choice but to go with Mike. Boy, am I glad I did.
We used to stay up late listening to Dr. Demento, then come in bleary-eyed and laugh about what we'd heard. We wrote skits and shared them with each other. When I returned from college, we'd hang out with my brother, run around in cars and make loud, silly jokes that made people look.
The last I heard from him was about 12 years ago, when he became a born again Christian and sent me a letter telling me he hoped I'd see the light soon. I, on the other hand, kept hoping that he would see the light and come back to his senses, and himself, again.
4. Jen H.
Jen and I first met at a Writer's Club meeting at Penn State. She was talking about getting some of her work published, and I was instantly jealous.
The next time I saw her, she was sitting on top of a television. We had both shown up at the first Monty Python Society meeting of the semester, and it was overcrowded. A small boned creature, she was perched on a TV, flirting with some good-looking guys. I was instantly jealous.
Over the next couple of weeks, we kept running into each other. I saw her everywhere. I could not get away from her, and every time I saw her she made me jealous. But she would grab me, talking excitedly about things, and I soon discovered there was no reason to be jealous of her. Because, when you thought about it, she was a lot like me.
3. Sadie.
When I first saw Sadie, she was with somebody I knew from WPSU, Paul P. I was at the student union building to catch a band. Sadie was wearing a black vest with a tiger on it and was using chopsticks like drumsticks, playing on the table, her shoe, anything she could find. I thought this was fantastic.
Paul P. was an uptight British, alt rock sort of guy. I went up to him and gasped, "Oh, my God! Are you Paul P.?" The elation in my voice was palpable.
"Yes," he said, rolling his eyes in a way that only those born in the British isles can manage.
"I've heard so much about you! Could I get your autograph?"
"Ha, ha," he countered and introduced me to Sadie instead. She told me later that she thought for the briefest of moments that Paul really was somebody famous.
Sadie and I remained great friends. She went away to Las Vegas for awhile, then came back and finished school. We ran around campus and hid from CIA dudes. She'd wear a man's suit jacket and I'd wear my miniskirt and we'd go out on the town and skank to ska bands. She lives in Philly right now — in my neck of the woods — and I haven't heard from her in ages. I miss her.
Technically, I already knew The Gryphon. We'd worked together at Otakon, the Japanese animation convention held each year in Baltimore. But this isn't so much a story about how we met. It's a story of how we started dating.
At the end of Otakon this year, we were hanging out into the wee hours in the hotel lobby with some friends and joking around about everything under the sun, including birth control pills, Freudian psychology and these weird Japanese toys called Afro-Kens.
The Gryphon mentioned he'd once had a convention guest sign a banana for him as a joke, when he delivered her lunch to her during her autograph session. I thought this was brilliant.
The next morning, I was packing up. I realized I still had a banana in my bag. So I went downstairs and, seeing The Gryphon in the lobby, I asked petulantly, loud enough for everyone to hear, "Would you sign my banana?"
He laughed, pulled out a Sharpie, signed it and, as they say, the rest is history. (Well, that and me posting banana innuendoes to the aforementioned bulletin board while under the influence of cold medicine, and he replying in kind.)
1. Billie.
My parents moved across the river when I was 5. I was not happy about this, but my mom had promised me that I'd have all sorts of new friends. So after we'd moved, I insisted that Mom take me out to find these friends. And so that's what we did.
We hadn't gotten very far; in fact, only to the house diagonally across the street. In front was a little girl, a couple years younger than me, her dark hair plaited into neat braids on either side of her head. She was standing in footie pajamas, doing something strange with a banana.
Mom and I drew closer, and I asked her what she was doing. She had a pin, and she was poking it into the banana. She was trying to slice a banana without peeling it. And she knew it worked, she said, because she'd seen it on TV. I thought this was fabulous.
She told us, "My name is Billie. My mom's in the shower. She doesn't know I'm outside right now." And all of a sudden, she looked up at the window and said, "Oh! The shower stopped. I have to go!" She ran back inside.
Billie and I have remained friends all these years, despite falling in with different crowds and running down different paths. Now she's living in Seattle, a single mom going to law school. Her son looks just like her. I wouldn't be surprised to find him, some day, trying to slice a banana without peeling it.
Moral:
I seem to have a karmic banana connection.
Copyright
2003 by Alyce Wilson
What
do you think? Share your thoughts
at Alyce's message board (left button):
