I wake up once during the night. A flash of lightning and the muffled sound of thunder grab my attention. Before I know it, though, I fall back asleep. When I get out of bed for breakfast, I feel that the heat wave is here for at least another day since the room temperature has cooled down only slightly during the night. I look out the window and am surprised to see that the neighbor’s driveway is wet. Obviously, it has rained, but I didn’t hear a drop.
Breakfast is casual, after which there is an hour of free time before the mall opens. The boys need shoes so The Shoe Outlet, located next to the Cinemas, is our first stop. Grandma buys Andy a $35 pair of Reeboks. It takes two more steps before we find something for Eddie. I find a selection of postcards at CVS. Otherwise, I’m simply along to enjoy the company of my family. JoAnna finds a couple of cute outfits for Eddie at K-Mart. With Eddie getting fussy whenever the stroller is not in motion, I push him back out to the mall and find a place where I can sit down and roll Eddie to sleep. While waiting for the others to rejoin us, I scan the growing crowd of shoppers for familiar faces. Yesterday when JoAnna and I took our walk downtown, I’m sure I spotted Kay Schaffer talking to a man who looked to be our age, standing at the intersection of Liberty & 2nd. It appears to be the same person who favored tight skirts in high school. She looks as though she’s retained her teenage body shape. Kay always had a mature appearance, at least from the waist down, filled out in all the right places. Her outfit 23 years after high school graduation is very summery: a floral print dress that stops three or four inches above the knees. Her thighs would probably register a 6 or 6.5 on the thin-to-fat scale. And, after all these year, Kay is still hitting the peroxide bottle. From a cursory glance – although with all this description, JoAnna would question just how cursory – Kay looks very good, at least ten years younger than her age.
Every time I go to the Warren Mall, I expect to run into someone I know. After all, I figure, I lived in the town continuously from 1957 to 1968 and have been a regular visitor ever since. Only once have I encountered a familiar face, and that was during the weekend of my 20-year high school reunion. The odds were definitely stacked in my favor. And the person I saw? Tim Nuhfer, my 7th-grade locker mate and the person who always sat behind me in home room during junior high school. During this most recent visit to the mall, I searched very baby-boomer face for a flash from the past. Let’s see, 420 people in my graduating class alone, hundreds more from other classes whose faces were once so familiar. Are we all scattered far and wide? Do fewer of us have a reason for visiting Warren anymore? Are the rest of us just not shopping today?
After lunch, JoAnna and I, with Eddie in the harness, take a walk to the high school and back. It’s a trip down memory lane that I have wanted to make for years. Just haven’t made time for it. We walk the length of East Fifth Avenue to the beginning of the snake path, take the obligatory short cut, then solemnly circle the building. The once panoramic view of Warren is now almost completely obscured by a wall of trees that line the hillside. The sprawling white-brick, smoky-glassed structure has changed not at all. On the outer walls of the gymnasium are the 30-year-old letters:
WARREN
AREA
HIGH
SCHOOL
I recall the lonely summer of 1963 when practically all I did was isolate myself in my bedroom to listen to the radio and study the charts in the latest issue of Billboard, and a casual remark made by my best friend and my former girlfriend hinting at a shared secret about the letters “ARIC”. Perhaps this is my oldest memory attached to the high school.
We first walk along the sides of the high school that were and remain most foreign to me: the band room,, the choir room, the long row of shop and automotive classrooms. There is an entrance to the school here that I recall using only once, during the last weeks of my senior year, when Mike and Dody and I slept in his parents’ trailer on Sunday night and went to school without the benefit of a change of clothes or a bath. Once inside the building, our first stop was the rest room, where I probably would have killed for a drop or two of shampoo. At this time in my life, I was very meticulous about my hair, methodically washing it twice every morning, combing it into place, then sitting under Mom’s bubble-top hairdryer until it was completely dry. This missed day of routine hygiene made me feel very self-conscious about my appearance.
At the back of the school grounds, we walk up the four flights of stairs to an open area that had not been cleared when I was in high school. A softball field is located here, the diamond almost completely overgrown with weeds. It appears to be an area not even used during the school year. As we walk toward the backstop, the view of Warren opens up to us. Although the temperature is cooler than yesterday, the air is still a bit hazy. It’s not a picture-perfect panorama, and the view is still not as expansive as it used to be years ago. I remind myself to review my slides for memory-lane reproductions.
As we walk past the two classroom wings, I think back to 10th grade Health, when I spend a good portion of this boring required course staring out the windows and watching other students pass back and forth along the sidewalk on which we are now walking. I could have satisfied this requirement by attending summer school right after the end of ninth grade, a de rigueur activity for A-track students, but I just couldn’t tolerate the idea of cutting into my summer vacation. Maybe we have another one of my early acts of rebellion here, not doing something expected of one with my academic status. Instead, and this is definitely on the plus side, I was assigned to a class comprised of a rather diverse group of outcasts. Senior bleach-blond heartthrob Bob Nelson. (No relation.) The girl who sat in front of me was a small-framed, large-busted, wanton underachiever who possessed the thinnest set of lips I’ve ever seen (and still was able to use her lipstick to maximum effect.) She teased her dark brown hair heavenward and wore tight dresses that threatened to cut off her circulation if she moved the wrong way. We talked; we became acquaintances, and if I hadn’t been in the class, I would have never interacted with someone so far removed from the student types that I was tracked with.
I wish I could remember some other names and faces. If I still had my high school yearbooks, I’d have a means to refire some of the memory cells buried deep in my subconscious.
Walking past the cafeteria, I am drawn up to a window like a piece of metal to a magnet. I peer inside and am amazed to find the tables and chairs set up just as they were in 1968. Funny thing. I can recall a feeling approaching terror at the beginning of the second semester of tenth grade when I suddenly realized that a change in lunch groups meant I no longer had anyone to sit with. Similarly, I can recall the camaraderie of the elite senior boys’ table (even though my unofficially assigned seat was at the low-status end of the cluster of three tables. But what about junior year? I can conjure up the dimmest of images, barely able to make out the forms of Mike, Mardi, and Tina. Do I also see Renee and Joan? Seems like there may have been a very happy, harmonious, and close lunch group at that time. If only I had at least transcribed all those yearbook messages. Another funny thing. Mom repeatedly lamented the loss of her high school yearbook. Now I can carry on that tune for her.
Before beginning our descent, we take a look into the exhibition area, the scene of many a high school dance as well as study halls. As with the cafeteria, this area of the school provides a tingling sense of déjà vu. The desks are arranged in the same formation, and the white and blue and gray floor tiles look as though they’ve held up well during the past 23 years. I want to be able to explore the school’s interior on this quiet day on the hill, but I make no effort to discover an inadvertently unlocked door.
We return to Grandma and Grandpa’s house via Fifth, Prospect, Division, Buchanan, and Third. Eleven years’ worth of tree growth has obscured all but a peephole of the view of Warren from the heights of Division and Prospect Streets. Again I think about all those great slides waiting to be enlarged and framed.
Unlike last year’s visit, this time around I make a sincere effort to contact old friends and arrange a reunion. Much to my delight, Renee is out at the cottage this weekend. After numerous phone calls, a Sunday get-together is tentatively scheduled. Mardi, Barb, Renee, and I will be able to catch up on the new and relive the old.
As usual, Mom seems to spend most of her time during our visits to Warren either preparing a meal or cleaning up after one. This visit is no different. No one bothers to offer her any assistance, and I get the feeling that’s the way she prefers it. She takes great pleasure in waiting on her family when we’re all together. If she can prepare daily microwave specials for Dale, she certainly isn’t going to complain about lavishing attention on her two previous grandsons and their wonderful parents. After all, she must worship the ground that JoAnna walks on considering all the changes that have taken place in my life since we met seven years ago. Her oldest son is married, very serious about and successful at his career (as evidenced by the WLA Librarian of the Year award), and has produced two wonderful children that are the envy of every grandparent.
After supper and some couchin’ time on the porch, JoAnna and I go out with Larry and Kim to see Hot Shots, a mildly funny spoof of Top Gun. From the review I read in the New York Times, I’m expecting more of a laugh riot, but the relentless zaniness in this setting starts to wear thin. I chuckle frequently but never cut loose with a full-throttle belly laugh, the minimal expectation I have for any movie with the Abrahams or Zucker name associated with it.
Larry drives us back to the house directly. Neither he nor Kim suggests that we go out for a drink somewhere. From the conversation we have in the car, it sounds as though Larry is eager to return home to watch The Howard Stern Show. We miss an opportunity to talk about Mom and Dad’s reluctance to travel to Wisconsin via any mode of transportation. JoAnna and I are attempting to lay the groundwork for a Christmas gathering with the Nelsons and Swansons, and it appears we have a major project of convincing on our hands.
We snuggle in bed for awhile. Both boys are asleep. JoAnna asks me for a kiss – a real kiss, not just a goodnight peck. I caress her lips gently, teasingly and before long our mouths have melted together in a simultaneous display of unbridled passion just like in the bodice-rippers. We have to be quiet, though, no heedless tearing off of undergarments. JoAnna’s initial suggestion is a relatively innocent one: high-school style making out, I am unable to restrain my hands from an exploratory mission of JoAnna’s body. My right hand slips into panties and luxuriates in the feel or her soft, furry pubic area. I stroke the area around her clitoris, occasionally inserting a finger or two into her vagina to get a better grip on her increasingly moist pleasure zone. I bring her to a rousing, writhing, though silent orgasm. Now it’s my turn to be stroked. JoAnna grasps my expectantly erect penis and skillfully returns the favor. I explode all over the bedsheets. Tonight we prove that mutual masturbation is as satisfying as intercourse.
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