Where Were You?

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom (20090505).

In those
dormitory days of yore, in the
hot football nights half-dangling with my
black ceramic beer mug out the window
over the stadium breezeway,
watching endless colors and styles of
Corvette Stingrays cruising up and down
6th Street and provocatively-dressed
co-eds scampering about wherever they were going,
blasting Darkness on the Edge of Town to the
supercharged and grateful Wildcat fans below, Bruce's
harp screaming sweet, sharp, pure as the
tears of angels, where were you on those nights,
I wonder now, and why didn't I
ever find you? When five years still lasted
five years and weren't gone in the wink of a
young girl's eye, when every riff Mark Knopfler played
still ripped right through your lungs (you remember
those chords), in those endless, heady days before
iPods -- hell -- before any of us had even
dreamt up the Internet, long before gui's and the
World Wide Web, and when I had no clumsy, clunky
Walkman, I played every last note of Making Movies
in my head during the long walk between classes, cos
after all, I always was a true-born romantic, in case you
hadn't noticed or figured that out just yet. Yeah.
So, where were you then?

When I was taking my calculus final exams,
where were you? Ah, I coulda used you then.
When I was reading Thomas Hardy and Edmund Spencer
and Thomas Mann instead of Mary Shelly and Robert
Matte and Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan and trying to decide
whether I should change my major to English, when
microbiology was confusing and difficult, when I
hated chemistry and physics, before we'd heard of AIDS or
MTV either one, where were you exactly? (Ah, Martha
Quinn -- remember Martha Quinn? No? Too bad for you.)
When I was lining up to squeeze past the born-again
extremist picketers to see The Life of Brian (ooh, a real
menace there) and across the mall I saw how the old
Chemistry Building had been immortally graffitied:
Long Live Bobby Sands, when none of us knew the names
Saddam Hussein or Mohammad Atta or Usama Bin Laden,
where, back in those good old days, were you? I mean, I
really want to know.

When Ronald Reagan was shot, when John
Lennon was shot, when we were squaring off with the
Soviets for mutually-assured destruction, when Bonzo
wandered around the White House, when reality became a
montage of bad war films from the 40s and 50s, when we
watched The Atomic Café and plywood panels encased the
Student Union bookstore windows (under renovation),
transforming it into the Nuke Wall ("Nuke Ronnie!" "Nuke
Nancy!" "Nuke Iran!" "Nuke the gay whales for Jesus!"
"I had my cat nukered!"), and we played Dungeons and
Dragons and I babysat the dorm phone and filched bacon
out of the Fidlee Fig, and we whiled away hours and hours
at Bookman's and the book tent at the Tanque Verde Swap
Meet (just back from various Sabino Canyon hikes) and ate
buttered fries at What's Your Beef? and a lot of frozen
pizzas and pop tarts, and when Altered States and Tron and
The Big Chill all seemed pretty cool, where were you when
all that was going on?

I'd really like to know. But the truth is, I think I'm glad we
didn't know each other then, even if it still seems only
weeks ago to me.

Because when we're that young, it's all too easy to get
locked into patterns of social expectation, even when we're
determined not to; even when you can't see it or feel it
going on around you, closing in around you, freezing you in.
And had I known you then, we would have had kids because
I would have insisted on it, and all else that follows from that.
But now, you have your kids, and I have mine, and neither of us
has any use for any of those expectations anymore. Now we have
both seen all that we need to see of how games of conformity
are played and how easily they are lost. And so let's
go on from here, from now, because I have no use for the past,
or for the notions of proper behavior they try to pin on us,
and so, I think, neither do you. And I assure you, most vividly,
most ardently, most honestly, most completely and without hesitation,
that no matter how improbable it might sound,
never in my life have I met anyone I love more than I love you
in this very instant, right now.