Summer of Boofus the Rat

I was feeling reminiscent today and I was going to show my toes but then I ran into the Dreaded Ex and I had to write about that instead.

So now I am back to feeling reminiscent. There was a small window in my life for two, maybe three months that was like the middle of a sandwich. It was a transition "living with druggie ex-boyfriend to going off to college" summer. And in that time, I made a very special friend named Jake. (Not the Jake who frequents this blog.)

The summer of '96 I learned about chat rooms. There was a local one for Sedona and I started to talk to this person "Pyrone". We figured out we went to the same school, graduated the same year and had the same classes. Apparently he had figured out who I was but I didn't know who he was. (Blame it on all the pot smoking.) I was bored and decided I would go meet him.

We hung out almost every day after that. He was a tennis pro. He tried to teach me tennis but I always wanted to pretend I was in a home run derby instead and I would pound the neon green balls over the fence onto the highway. (I secretly always hoped I would cause an accident but it never happened.)

I saw every movie with Jake that summer and he never let me pay. I remember walking out of "Tin Cup". I remember when we watched "Independence Day" and the lady in front of us got scared at one point, jumped and her popcorn went flying out of her hand and rained down on us. I ate 500 pounds of sour patch kids that summer.

He almost messed his drawers the time I put a dead, stuffed tarantula that was in a glass globe at his desk. (They sell those spiders in Sedona for all of the hopeless tourists. I bought it because Jake was terrified of spiders. It was hilarious. He put it in his tennis bag that day and it was still in his tennis bag a month later. He didn't want to touch it.) He fell over backwards and ran up the stairs screaming like a girl. My sister and I laughed so hard we couldn't stand up.

We would get together with other teens and play hide and go seek when Talaquepaque would close down. (An artsy-fartsy mall with lots of shops and cool places to hide.)

Jake loved me. I could have dated him and he would have handed me the world on a silver platter. But I was very jaded and mean at that point in my life. I was trying to soften up, but the transition from a druggie's girlfriend to normal life wasn't quick. I really, really liked Jake but there was never any spark for me on my end. I toyed with the idea of dating him but I loved him as a friend and respected him so much that I knew I didn't want to date him. I would have ruled his life and made him miserable. He would have spent every penny on me whether I asked him to or not. He would have given everything to me and I would have greedily taken it and not given anything back.

He nicknamed me Penny Lane after the Beatles song. We spent many, many nights at Denny's until 2 or 3 in the morning. We would lie in the driveway at my house until dawn looking at the Milky Way.

And I went to college. And I know the moment I lost Jake forever was when my friend pointed out I had some black mascara in my blonde hair. He tried to join in to see where it was and I dismissed him and told him he wouldn't notice because it was a girl thing. Don't ask me why that was the moment he gave up on me, it just was.

I got married and Jake stopped calling. I hope he gets married and calls me again sometime. I owe him a lot. I miss him at the moment.