Feels Like the First Time (2 page)

“We went to school together.”

She stared blankly, and I couldn’t take the suspense. I gave her my biggest smile.

“Dawn, it’s Shawn.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“Shawn who?” she finally asked.

The question took all the air out of my ego. I wondered if I really looked so different. She examined me and I could tell she wasn’t making the connection.

“Shawn Inmon. We lived next door to each other.” I thought of adding, “You know… your first?”

She took a half-step back with stunned recognition. Her hands flew to her mouth and her brown eyes widened. It was a gesture the years never washed from my memory. I watched her expression flood with memories.

“Oh my God,” she said. She paused and said it again. Each word was its own sentence. Oh. My. God. The young girl who took my order bounced over with a broad smile.

“Hi!” she said. “I’m Connie, Dawn’s daughter.”

I offered a lame smile to Connie. It was impossible for me to look away from Dawn. I laughed nervously but couldn’t speak. Ten seconds of awkward silence followed while a Buick idled patiently behind me.

“I’m Shawn,” I said weakly to Connie. My eyes were trained on Dawn. “Your Mom and I were friends a long time
ago.” Connie’s smile told me she knew what kind of friends we had been. Dawn continued to murmur “oh, my, God” over and over, shaking her head. She chanted eerily, like a record needle stuck in a groove.

I tried to say something to break through, but I was so stunned at being this close to her, I couldn’t think of anything worthwhile.

“It was good to see you,” I mumbled. “I was just on my way home to Enumclaw”. Dawn didn’t seem to hear me. She was lost in her own world.

I grew frustrated at my inability to get my brain and tongue to work together. I turned to Connie.

“Tell your Mom it was good to see her, okay?” I gave her a poor attempt at a wink and failed. I took one last, long look at Dawn, and drove off, dizzy with the thought of her.

I wanted so badly to turn my car around and run into the tiny restaurant, yelling, “Dawn. Baby, it’s me.” I wanted to hold her tight against me and let the intervening years evaporate. Discretion and the ring on my finger prevailed, and I kept my wheels rolling forward, moving me further away from her with each second.

I had suppressed all thoughts of her for three decades. Now she was real again, and I couldn’t prevent the surge of feelings. Memories, sensations, and emotions swept over me in relentless waves, choking me as I merged onto I-5.

The years had changed nothing. I loved her still, infinitely, after so much time. I loved her as I had when I kissed her tear-stained face goodbye on Valentine’s Day, 1979.

I turned my music up and let the miles roll under my wheels. My body was in 2006, but my mind, spirit, and heart were firmly lodged in the 1970’s. 

A Long Time Ago

I was fifteen in the summer of 1975, trying to make the transition from childhood to whatever was next.
Intellectually, I was mature beyond my years. Emotionally, I was way behind
.

The OPEC oil embargo and energy shortage were fresh in everyone’s mind. There was talk of saving energy for the first time. Daylight Savings Time lasted all year, and the national speed limit was lowered to 55 MPH to save gas. Gerald Ford was in the White House.

I lived in a 1965 doublewide trailer on a half-acre lot on the outskirts of Mossyrock, a flyspeck town in rural western Washington. The twin cities of Centralia and Chehalis sat forty miles away, with less than 30,000 people between them. When people said they were going “out town,” that’s what they meant.

I had already seen a lot of ups and downs in fifteen years. I spent my first five years living happily on a hundred-acre ranch with my Mom, Dad, brother, and three sisters. In the mid-‘60s, the City of Tacoma dammed the river that ran through the Riffe Valley. That dam would eventually put our 100 acres underwater, so they took us to court and forced us to sell the ranch.

Dad found it hard to accept that the government could take the land he had painstakingly bought and farmed over a twenty-year period. Eventually, it took a toll on his health. On Halloween 1965, he had a heart attack and died. My three oldest sisters had already moved out and gotten married, so just my Mom, older brother Mick and I remained in our suddenly-quiet house.

Within a year, Mom met a man named Robert, one of the workers who had come to town to build the dam, and he stuck around. They were married in 1967 and I had a step-dad. By then my brother moved out and we moved into a trailer in Mossyrock. In two years, I had gone from living in a house filled with my family that sat on a hundred acres in an idyllic valley, to a doublewide on a cramped lot with my mom and a man that felt like a stranger.

My mom started drinking after my dad died. I didn’t know much about alcoholism, but I figured she had a problem when I began finding Mason jars of vodka hidden around the house, including in my own dresser drawers.

Learning how to deal with her drinking was difficult enough, but the violence that came along with it made life scary and unpredictable for me. It didn’t happen every day, but I came to realize that every few months there would be an explosion of anger between her and Robert. Next would come screaming, fist fights and the occasional trip to the ER. The first time it happened, I was sure that would be the end of things, and it would be back to just my mom and I on our own again. I was dismayed when everything was quickly forgotten. Over the years, these violent outbursts happened less frequently, but their impact never faded. They changed me forever.

I didn’t adjust to all these changes well. I withdrew into a self-made shell. I grew from an outgoing, happy five-year-old into a quiet, reserved teenager. I was gangly and awkward. I had grown more than ten inches in a single year, and I wasn’t accustomed to my new body. I wore my hair however Mom told me to get it cut. My closet was full of T-shirts and bell-bottom pants, and I wore thick, black glasses that hadn’t been in fashion since Buddy Holly’s airplane went down in 1959. This goes a long way toward explaining why I had never had a date.

Most kids go through an awkward stage, and I was no exception. Mine happened to last a little longer than most. I left behind the adorable cuteness of childhood at age nine, and didn’t come into my own until I was eighteen. The years in between were an unrelenting stretch of homely awkwardness.

To make matters worse, one of my best friends and next door neighbor, Mark Panter, moved to Seattle. Mark and I had always found unique ways to stay busy. Several years before, my step-dad had brought home an old 100-gallon barrel. It leaned against our garden shed for a long time with water inside it and rust eventually formed. One day we tipped it over out of sheer boredom and it made a cool
shoosh-shoosh
sound, like a giant Indian rain stick.

During the summer of 1974, we spent hundreds of hours riding on top of the barrel, moving it along like competitive log rollers, and making up games that usually involved pitching each other headfirst onto the lawn. Our moms were sure we would kill ourselves, but it kept us out of the house, and more importantly, out of trouble.

If we could gather up a group of kids in the neighborhood, we’d turn the giant barrel on its end and use it as a base for a game of Werewolf. It was like Hide ‘n Seek, except cooler–at least to us. Teenagers wouldn’t be caught dead playing a kids’ game today, but it was a different time. We didn’t have iPods, cell phones or three hundred channels on TV.

At night Mark and I sat under the old cherry tree that grew in one corner of our yard and told stories and lies. We talked about girls we liked, and watched bats eating the moths hovering around the streetlight.

We heard that if you tossed a pebble into the path of a bat’s sonar, it would follow it all the way to the ground and knock itself silly. For weeks we tried to make that happen without success, but the fun was in the trying.

One day that summer, Mark’s dad lost his job and they moved away almost immediately. Watching bats eat moths was much less fun alone, and even if I could manage to sucker one into crashing into the ground, I didn’t think anyone would believe me.

After a few weeks, I heard a new family was moving into Mark’s place, but I wasn’t hopeful. Their arrival reinforced the fact that my friend wasn’t coming back. Plus, they were from California. In the mid-’70s, there were few things more unpopular in rural Washington than a transplanted Californian. There was a widely-held belief they had already used up everything good in California, and now they were invading our bucolic town to do the same.

The day the moving van arrived, Mom and my step-dad watched as everything was unloaded and carried inside. I was interested too, until I saw they didn’t have any kids my age. After that I couldn’t have cared less. Late that afternoon, our new neighbors emerged and walked around their new front yard, squinting in the sunlight. My step-dad was an outgoing type, and crossed the yard to say hello. I stayed behind in the driveway observing and pretending to work on my ten-speed bike. A large woman, Colleen wore a long, flowing muumuu. The man, Walt, was smaller and mostly kept to himself. Colleen seemed to control the conversation so that Walt may not have had a choice.

I recall Colleen saying how glad she was to be away from the urban sprawl of California. I heard her tell my step-dad about walking out of the house earlier and, seeing a plane flying overhead, shaking her fist at it and saying “How dare you, vestige of civilization, follow us to this cultural backwater.”

And then it happened: the moment I first saw Dawn Adele Welch. She stepped out of the house quietly. When she heard her mom talking, she rolled her eyes, looked at me, turned on her heels, and went back inside.

Dawn was just a kid of eleven then. She was too young for me to be interested in hanging out with her. But my first thought was, “that kid’s got attitude.” From a young age, she had the ability to let you know what she was thinking with very few words.

I rarely saw Dawn during the next few months. In addition to being four years older than her, I was a bookish boy who devoured Robert Heinlein and Edgar Rice Burroughs stories. Dawn loved her animals. She was always outside with her Dobermans, Peter and Chastity, her horse, Shiloh, and her goat named Fred.

Soon after Dawn moved in next door, school started and I began the daunting task of being a high school sophomore. I had suddenly grown to six feet tall and the basketball coach did a double-take as he passed me in the hall. In less than a year, I had gone from an under-sized guard to the tallest kid in my class. Unfortunately for the Mossyrock Vikings, I never grew another inch, and the added height only made me more awkward.

Dawn and I never saw each other at school. I was in high school, and she was at the junior high. We rode the #9 bus home, got off at the same stop, and walked quietly into our houses, but boredom would eventually force us outside. At that time there was no grudge fence between our houses, so it was natural to meet in the yard and talk quietly about school or friends. Because we lived on the outskirts of such a small town, there were few other kids around. I was so lacking for female conversation that I was happy to get some practice in, even if it was with the kid next door.

We slowly told each other the stories of our lives. Even at that age she was a series of interesting contradictions. She had an innate sense of calm. And yet, there was a wildness in her I was sure nothing could ever tame. She was shy and deliberate about trusting people. She could always make me laugh with a simple look. When I boasted about high school and my friends, her sidelong glance told me it was better to just be honest.

The best part of our friendship was the feeling that she accepted me for who I was: an older, nice kid who was safe to hang out with. I was clearly out of step with the cool crowd, but she didn’t seem to care. She always accepted me for who I was, and that meant a lot.

Over time we became each other’s fallback friend. If neither of us had another friend over, or didn’t have practice of some sort, we would hang out. As the months passed, I started to look forward to hanging out with her. One evening we sat in our yard talking about things that were important to us–like whether Kojak was tougher than Baretta. That night Dawn told me her favorite song was
The Air That I Breathe
by The Hollies. Since she had told me that
Wildfire
by Michael Martin Murphy was her favorite song just a few weeks earlier, I pointed out she could only have one favorite song. She pointed out I was crazy, and she would have as many favorite songs as she wanted. That night, after Colleen called Dawn inside for dinner, I lingered outside, kicking the heads off of dandelions. I was sorry to see her go in, and I was a little surprised at the feelings for her that were growing inside me.