Going home

This week, I dithered about how I was going to get home for a vacation next week. I tried renting a car, I tried finding adequate plane tickets, I tried buses, but ultimately, I was led to the train. I will be spending ten hours in a train next week, going home to spend five days sleeping in my parents' basement and going to eat at Perkins with them. Oh, dear God.

Every time I go home, it's the same...We walk into Perkins (my mother stopped cooking when I was ten) and mom obviously points to the night manager on duty, saying "Amy, doesn't he look like Freddie Prinze, Jr.?"
"No, Mom, he doesn't. Not even if I squint."
"Well, he's always real, real nice to us."
"I'm not marrying him, Mom."
"I didn't say you had to. I just said he was handsome. And maybe that he looked like someone you'd think was 'hunky.' "
"Mom, I babysat kids older than him. And when have I EVER used the word 'hunky'?"
"Oh, oof, just sit down and stop sassing me. Say, there's that nice man who sold us a footstool at Hennen's. I hear he's divorced. He kinda looks like Harrison Ford, doesn't he?"
"STOP IT!"

If it's not the furniture store guy or the Perkins night manager, it's the kid whose parents live down the road from my mom and dad who now lives in Nashville and produces Contemporary Christian Music and is still nursing his high school crush on my school's only documented lesbian. He's a really great guy, but I can't get over the fact that I once saw him weeping copiously in school when his parakeet had escaped and flown off into the wild. There he was, in the back of Mrs. Erickson's sixth grade class, silently sobbing and drawing a picture of his budgie on his book cover. That's not a mental image one is likely to forget when choosing a mate. Plus, if he's still pining for the lesbian, it's doubtful if he'd even be interested in me.

So, I'm taking the train home largely so that my mother can exercise her atrophied matchmaking muscles. She's unaware of how bad she is at it, and how obvious her machinations are, but it's very sweet. She means well, but truthfully, if there had been anyone datable in my home town (pop. 1066), I would have dated them in high school. Actually, in high school, it was ME that everyone thought was the lesbian. The actual lesbian wore sweater sets and curled her hair. Guess we both had everyone fooled!

The last time I took the train home, I wound up running in to the first boy I ever dated after not seeing him in three and a half years. We met when we were 12. At asthma camp. I was waiting in Union Station in Chicago, during a three hour layover when he walked by me. I called his name, he turned abruptly, and it took him what seemed like minutes to recognize me. It broke over him like a slow wave and he rushed over to give me a hug. We sat and talked before boarding the same train, and during our conversation, the frames of his glasses snapped in two. "You know," he said, "I've had these glasses since just before the last time I saw you." Hm. We sat next to each other for our ten hour ride through the snowy landscape to St. Paul, watching the Christmas lights of Wisconsin flash by the windows. We talked. We talked. We talked. He was a man in love with words, so we talked even more. At some point, I showed him my very new engagement ring. He said that he had always regretted the fact that we had never really and truly dated. I almost hit him for saying that.

When you're 12, you're not dating for real. It's just play. It's just something to do between arts and crafts and dinner time at asthma camp. But I was always very attatched to him. I always hoped in my heart that we would both find ourselves in the same fabulous city, fabulously successful, and our paths would cross and we'd fall in love and have a Hepburn-Tracy repartee-filled romance. So there we were, in a fabulously implausible scenario (what's more Hepburn-Tracy-like than a chance meeting at a train station?), in a fabulous city and we didn't really do anything about it. I was engaged. He was dating someone. We lost touch. So. So, another impossibly gorgeous scenario just winds up being a funny story to tell people when the subject of trains come up in conversation. Last year, I was living in New York when I happened to open up the New York Post to the business section and saw his name in the byline of one of the articles. I smiled and threw the paper away, not bothering to see if there was an email address below the article. I figured that, if we were supposed to meet again, we would.

I told that story to my friend who took me to the Cubs game on Monday. This is the same friend who took me to the other Cubs game back in June. He said that I'm like Brenda Starr, with weird coincidences happening to me all the time. That somehow, my life is made up completely of synchronicitous events, devoid of all design and plan. Maybe THAT'S why I can't resign myself to dating the pre-pubescent night manager of Perkins. How could he possibly compete with Amtrak?