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Little Ben, waiting to exhale...

little Ben, waiting to exhale….

TThe Chevy’s latest quirk is to decelerate on inclines to a disturbing 30mph; as we wound slowly up the road Kate murmured under her breath “This is not Seattle”. I’d been telling her for weeks that we would stay in Seattle, the City of Flowers, because in a silly way I thought my friend Jamie lives there. She doesn’t. She lives in the Cascade Mountains, on the outskirts of Redmond, WA. We passed a building with a jubilant sign declaring “Teriyaki Milk Barn!” and took a left.

I called Jamie five times, crossing little bridges, passing farms pastoral and weird, twisting our way up the mountainside. I looked forward to seeing the home she’s made with her husband, Bryan, a video game developer from Everett. What’s little Jamie been up to all these years?

I can’t really say how we met; she was a grade beneath me in high school, but her smarty-pants program and mine often threw us together. Was it a party? Doubtful–I rarely got invited. Soccer? Model U.N.? Shucks, I forget. She helped me with math homework, I made ouija boards for her friends. In the summer of my junior year, I left home and stayed with her family till graduation. I was given a room of my own and loved it. Jamie seemed to me then a kind of “golden child”: pretty, blonde, smart, friends with the freaks and the geeks (this was before they got their own show), possessing of gentle parents who allowed her a cool boyfriend, and –to top it all off– her mother raised rabbits in the backyard.

The last time I saw her, Jamie was living on Monroe Avenue in Rochester, tending her store that sold chain mail jewelry and black-black dresses, and…I seem to recall a certain little pair of…shiny Boots of Leather? Downy sins of streetlight fancies? You can only wear those things in TOWN, Mavis, not in the country.

We turned up a driveway, rounded the bend and rolled to a stop. A screen door slammed shut and out came Jamie, wearing a black hoodie and slim-fit jeans. From her purple house scrambled a pack of dogs, many dogs! and I knew that Jamie was the same sweet kid of my heart’s memory.
These are the sort of people you want your children around: they’re vegetarians, succumb to ice cream once in a while, compost their own food scraps, and rehabilitate abused animals. He paints, she welds, he cooks, she sews. Sore from our own domestic attempts, Kate and I took heart in the love these two so clearly shared.

Maybe there is hope for us yet. Who knows? Maybe there is lots of hope.

Tagged as: favorite quirks of the Chevy S10, What is this thing called Love?