#and this led to talking about how especially older stories are often interconnected in some way and are all part of the same conversation

[cultivating-wildflowers]

🎧

[sudsybear]

Allergies

Because I quit SubDeb, I suddenly had more free time. No Sunday afternoon meetings, no mandatory attendance at club events, instead I developed other friendships. A year ahead of me in school, Anna also refused to participate in Sub Deb. Our mothers were on the Life Squad together, and our fathers worked for the same company, carpooling on occasion. For a time, our parents were all involved in the local community theater group. Anna and I were thrown together so often growing up that by the time we were in high school, we were friends in our own right. So, while Julie and Valli and Erin were busy with Sub Deb Club, Anna drew me into her world and her friends. We did girl stuff together when other friends were busy.

 She pulled me into her own high school clique. Like any group of high school friends, “membership” in the group was fluid; we were spread over several classes, one to three years apart. Interests varied and conflicting family and social obligations changed the weekly gatherings. Even so, we were all close friends, running together, having fun, alternately antagonizing and protecting one another.

 Ross was friends with Anna and Heather. Victor and Heather dated and I was friends with Heather and Cynthia, Valli and Cynthia were friends, both were friends with Jenny, with whom David shared a unique friendship. Cynthia lived just a few houses up from Victor and Igor. It’s all muddled and very confusing, and however it came about, I got to know Victor and his younger brother Igor. Another chain of friendship links led from Victor to Igor to Christopher to David and hence to me. Trust me, we were all intertwined and interconnected, we were quite clannish. The gang of us spent a lot of time together; we all knew each other’s kitchens and phone numbers.

 Anna announced, “Let’s meet at my house,” word got around, and we knew the place to meet. Anna’s home was a then-contemporary mid-60’s two-story colonial on a cul-de-sac at the top of a long residential street. Older homes (20s, 30s, and 40s) flanked the street at the bottom of the hill, and as you gained altitude, lot sizes got smaller while houses got bigger and younger. We sat in the living room of her parents’ home, and laughed and talked, the television tuned to MTV or the radio playing. Her parents might be in the kitchen or family room, close by but not intrusive. Our discussions ran the usual teenage gamut, gossip, music, clothing, and what to do later that same evening.

 We worried about the typical Midwestern suburban teenage problems - who was going to the pizza parlor before the football game on Friday night, who would we sit with in the stands, where would we go after the game. Who was going to walk to Corral together. Who was dating whom? We knew each other’s class schedules, phone numbers, kitchens, and bedrooms. We gossiped and giggled with each other, teased and defended each other, and offered advice, solicited or not. Along with a dozen other friends in our group, we all spent time together and I allowed myself to be dragged into outings and events, and got to know the boys better – David, Ross, Greg, Victor and Igor. There were others.

 One night David and Christopher diagrammed the myriad relationships using circles and triangles and color-coded arrows on a sheet of paper. Who was dating who, who used to date and were no longer speaking, who graduated but was still around and involved with the rest of us however tangentially. And who were only peripherally connected, mostly busy with other activities and different friends. Word got out about the diagram, and people worried about where they were drawn, what arrows pointed to whom. The whole incident caused quite a ruckus and the diagram was secreted away - never seen again.

 Overall, we enjoyed spending time with each other in the dynamics of group dating. I liked some but not all the boys and wasn’t particularly exclusive. They were mostly fun to be with. And yet, at some point during the evening Ross and I left the house together. For Ross, allergies kicked in and he couldn’t tolerate being in the house anymore. Anna’s family dog was a large white Samoyed. (I know that’s redundant for those who know Samoyeds - what Samoyed isn’t large and white?) Ross was extremely allergic. I was either tired of the tears and teenage histrionics, or the loud music, or both, and needed a breath of quiet and fresh air. So, we left. Just walked away together.

 I tugged on his arm, “Come on, Ross, let’s get your head clear. You’re miserable.” And he followed along willingly.

 They were comfortable walks. We were companionable and supportive. Ross needed to clear his head, I could not tolerate the petty jealousies the girls had for each other over the boys and needed to remove myself from the situation. My patience with girls crying, “She stole my boyfriend,” was limited. I had even less patience for the, “She was mean to me,” comments. So Ross and I left. Just walked away.

 We ambled (perambulated perhaps?) along the sidewalk up and down the hill – long enough for his head to clear and for me to work off nervous energy. We talked about Greg and Valli (each of our best friends were dating each other), Anna, what he and Shari did together. We gossiped about other families we knew. We walked, ran, and laughed. We skipped along the sidewalk like elementary schoolers, enjoying the feeling – step-hop, step-hop, step-hop. Other times we danced in the starlight, spinning around and falling to the ground. He’d hock a loogie, spit, and I’d do the same, making him laugh. We laughed together – oh how we laughed! Sometimes, we found a comfortable spot to sit in a neighbor’s front lawn, or leaned against a known vehicle parked on the street, and talked for a while; places we dreamed of going, movies we enjoyed, whether or not the football team was winning or losing, which teachers we liked or didn’t. By the time we got back to Anna’s I could cope with the histrionics (which either escalated in our absence or calmed down and dissipated) and he could breathe again for a while.

 But Ross was two years older – already a junior while I was a young freshman. We weren’t interested in dating – never crossed my mind anyway. Sure, Ross was “cute” - tall, lanky, dirty blonde hair, smile lines accenting his lean face. His hazel eyes changed color with mood or what he was wearing. But I wasn’t ready for “older boys”. Instead he and Shari went steady, later he dated Sara, another friend of Anna’s. Instead, ours was an acquaintanceship – we never called each other on the phone, nor were ever in each other’s house, never passed notes in school. We saw each other within the context of “the group” and served on Corral Board together, but on different committees. He ran on the boys’ track team with Greg, Valli and I ran together with the girls. We shared seats on the bus and cheered each other on.

 The following school year, Ross’ senior year, my sophomore year, David and I played at romance. He and I became close friends within the clique. We were all so entangled I don’t remember who he knew or how he was connected to whomever. What I do know is that I spent my sophomore year solidifying friendships, especially with David. We were pals. We had fun together. We laughed, we danced, and we played. We thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company. Our academic worlds did not compete, our social world was cozy and comfortable, and our teenage hormones complemented each other extremely well. He and I spent so much time together that friends finally goaded us into publicly conceding that we were “going out”.

 David is 5’6” in his Nikes. Lean and compact, you can’t call him wiry, but certainly he’s all muscle. More like a badger than a weasel. And why not? He rode his bicycle all over Wyoming for his paper route, and rode his skateboard down all the hills before that. Puberty hit, and while he didn’t gain much in height, he grew a beard immediately. He shaved it as a favor for his mother for his senior photo, but grew it back within a week. He wore his soft dark brown hair short and spiky along with his straight brown beard he kept close to his face. He keeps secrets behind his brown eyes. He has an ageless face; at age sixteen he could have passed for twenty-five and at thirty-five, even with a receding hairline he could still pass for twenty-five. Like me, David is a “youngest.” His older sisters were in school with my older brothers and without ever discussing it, we knew each other’s only child/youngest child position and the effect on our personalities – young, but old at the same time.

 David and I were friends first and foremost and I went along with him and his buddies, Christopher, Victor and Igor, and others when they were out and about. One Saturday afternoon the boys dragged me to the arcade. Some teenagers in the 1980s played video games on separate consoles hooked up to the family room television – Atari, Commodore. But these guys blew their money playing games at the arcade – PacMan, Donkey Kong, Asteroids, Space Invaders…we could blow $15 in 15 minutes.

 (Personally, I prefer the romance of pinball; a real ball with flippers controlled by springs. My grandfather was a pinball fiend in his day, playing at the lunch counter near the courthouse where he practiced law. My affinity for the real game of skill was inborn. Unfortunately, pinball games have gone high tech. These days pinball machines have computer chips controlling the flippers, the bumpers, and tallying the score. They’re all electronic digital crap controlled by a programmer long since dead of a drug overdose.)

 If the group didn’t meet at Anna’s, we gathered at Victor and Igor’s, goofing off in the basement until everyone arrived and we could leave together for our destination. Victor and Igor and Alex are brothers. The product of a Russian mother and Central American father, Victor was 6’ tall, white blonde with blue eyes and had that teenager slenderness that you might call wiry. He had a wild energy and a streak of vengeance that got him in trouble more than once. His “little” brother Igor was 6’4”, with dark hair, brown eyes. He was lanky, and not yet comfortable with his height. Igor had heart surgery as a child and the scar ran from his sternum around to his back. You noticed a slight deformity only when we swam together at the public swimming pool, but he was just Igor, so who cared? And Alex did his best to keep up with his older siblings. Just enough younger than Victor and Igor, he got into more trouble than he should have, and after his freshman year, was sent to a military academy for his high school years.

 The Morenos lived a couple of blocks over from my house. Like ours, their house was built in the 1920s and had relatively few remodel jobs over the years. The basement was dry, but unfinished. Someone put in a row of fluorescent lights along the ceiling. The furnace room and laundry area were walled off separately and a curtain hung in front of the lone extra toilet next to the washtub. It had been furnished of sorts with a musty rug over the concrete floor and an old couch. An old 1960s coffee table held our drinks and current projects. Victor and Igor and pals played Dungeons and Dragons amidst the cobwebs and must. Igor was enthusiastic about his Society for Creative Anachronism and made chain mail in his spare time. Sure, the basement was grungy, but the grunge meant we didn’t have to worry about feet on the furniture or much of anything else either. We had fun down there, listening to music, planning our weekend escapades, gossiping, chastising and teasing each other.

 As a group we caravanned with Victor and Igor and other friends in the “Grenade” (an old Ford Grenada – two-door, olive green with black vinyl interior) to play Frisbee golf. Yet another night a bunch of us decided we needed to see the new mural, Cincinnatus. The artist Richard Haas, recently completed his trompe l'oeil masterpiece on the side of the downtown Kroger headquarters in celebration of the company centennial. We weren’t quite sure where it was, so we spent an inordinate amount of time cruising one-way streets until we finally found it.

 There was a growing interest in teenage suburban male pyrotechnics. Victor, Igor, David, Moj and Christopher had been enthusiastic about burning gasoline, lighter fluid, kerosene, and paraffin wax. David built model rockets, and played with the rocket engines. Together they built an “apparatus” involving paraffin wax, water and gasoline (?) and set it off in the Moreno’s back yard. We’re lucky no one was ever seriously injured. Sometimes I’d be around, but when the testosterone levels got to be too high, I got outta there and found my girlfriends.

 After our adventures, or to end them, we drove to Skyline, one of several local chili parlor chains. The menu consists of two items, Cincinnati chili and cheese coneys; anything else on the menu is just a variation of those two items. The restaurant we frequented was located at the corner of Clifton and Ludlow Avenues, on the far end of Fraternity Row near the University of Cincinnati campus. It stayed open until 3 or 4 a.m. on weekends, and after the movie, party, or Corral event we often drove down to the eatery to satisfy our hunger pangs. We drove too fast down the hill to get there, under the highway overpass, across the railroad tracks and then we drove too fast up the hill to get there. We parked in the small parking lot and walked around the building to go inside. David ordered a five-way and medium root beer. I ordered a 4-way/bean and a large Coke. Whomever was with us ordered their own, and we laughed and giggled and flirted until our food arrived. Once sated, and finally getting tired, we drove too fast to get home, coasting down the steep narrow curves on the one side and racing back up the wide roadway on the other side.

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