Pancake State

Sunday night we were tucked in for the night. Settled down to watch Zach Braff and Natalie Portman in Garden State. It's a film about twentysomethings that are lost.

Rick called and after much fancy old school disc jockey talking convinced Katee and me to go for pancakes. We put the movie on pause. Left Charlie sleeping on the couch and went venturing out (poor Charlie, just when things get settled in his system along comes another med change that keeps him tied to his life-boat-couch).

We ended up at Bossier's IHOP for smokes and strawberry waffles. There is no smoking allowed in the Shreveport IHOP and Bossier's management informed us there would be no smoking there after January 1 because of state law.

Believe it or not they were out of strawberries. Rick had to make due with whipped cream. Katee and I settled (sulked?) for water. No, really we had eaten all day and were not hungry. So we filled our time by taking myspace pictures of ourselves. At which time Rick had to stare at the two of us and make the realization we both have beauty marks just above our lips on the left side of our faces.

I first met Rick when I started working in Shreveport radio. He was the evening guy on KROK and I was hired to do overnights. That was over twenty years ago. It's good to reconnect with someone who knew you back in the day. It's like that Sunscreen Song:"... because the older you get the more you need the people who knew you when you were young."

Or maybe it's what Sue Miller has her first-person narrator think about in the novel While I Was Gone: "But here's what I thought: that if I had a crush, it was on an earlier Eli, one who didn't exist anymore, and the real Eli was just a vehicle for it. Or, perhaps even more complicated, that the crush --- if you could call something so psychologically distorted by such a playful name -- was on myself. The middle-aged Eli contained for me, of course, his youthful self, yes. But he contained me also. The self that had known him then. Myself-when-young."

So we could have stayed home and watched the flick but instead we went out to make our own little moving picture. I wanna script a movie about fortysomethings that are lost. It's easy to be twenty and muddling about but there are oh so many challenges to being almost half a century and still stumbling around. Welcome to my life.