And So, It Seems We Go Way Back
Jun. 24th, 2008 12:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
exhilarationWhen you see this line on your flist, quote something from Doctor Who.
"I'm always okay."
Well, I worked all weekend. All. Freakin. Weekend. Including Saturday morning at 5am (Saturday is not my day to work at the Coffee Co) at the Coffee Co in town instead of the one on the boardwalk. Mine and Erica's dinner did not happen - I do not have cream cheese - and in fact I have not seen Erica all weekend either. Bevan and Jury came over to my house after Bevan got off work and we had a few beers out on the porch. That was actually pretty nice. I've got a great porch. And since Erica wasn't around, there were no weird Bevan/Erica vibes going on. But that was Thursday. I didn't go out all weekend or have anyone over or do anything remotely cool - well, I did see Doctor Who. That counts, right?
So today I worked this morning at the Coffee Co. Then I got called in to work again this afternoon, also at the Coffee Co, cause, I dunno, I guess someone else called out. And who came in for some coffee? Oh, Bevan and Jury. Apparently they were out surfing in the evening and decided to come up on the boardwalk afterwards.
I always thought Bevan surfed early in the morning - I guess he does surf early in the morning, I mean, the Coffee Co in town is on his way home and he used to stop in there a couple times a week after surfing. I guess he probably still stops in there a few times a week, it's just that I'm not there. But anyway, I know what he likes to drink, he likes to have a large vanilla cappuccino with a tiny splash of almond in it too. So they said they were picking up dinner near where my house is so I asked if they'd wait fifteen minutes for me to get off and then take me home, and we ended up all picking up sandwiches and coming back to my house, and then we took the sandwiches and some beer out to the beach and sat on the blanket for a bit and that was pretty nice.
So I guess people who live here do go out on the beach, just not during peak beach hours or something. I don't know. I haven't really figured it out - maybe there is nothing to figure out. Some people insist they haven't even seen the ocean in years even if they only live a few blocks away, and then there's people like Erica who want to go out on the beach all the time at all hours of the day. I guess everyone is different.
So, let's see, how did the conversation start... I think Jury was talking about it having been a while since she last tried to surf (I got the impression that she isn't very good) and somehow I then got to talking about me trying to learn to surf when I was a kid. I know I've mentioned before that my family lives here - I've got two aunts and uncles who live nearby and one cousin still, but when I was a kid all my cousins lived here and so did my grandparents, and my family spent a whole lot of time here. I have one cousin who is the same age as me, and we would usually hang out whenever my family was in the area. Also, that same cousin always worked at his uncle's pizza shop in town - not my uncle, his uncle on the other side, the one who isn't related to me at all. Jury worked there as well - I think she's maybe two years younger than I am, but, anyway, she knows my cousin from working there.
So I was saying how I would go to the beach with my cousins in the summer and we would go boogie boarding, and that one summer, I forget really which one, but it was probably a combination of several summers, when we were a little older, like twelve and thirteen and maybe fourteen or so, that we'd either get up real early or go out on the beach later in the evening and he would try to teach me to surf, which I thought was so cool cause people who surf are definitely cool and that there was one summer in particular that me and him and his friends went almost every night for, oh, like two weeks straight and I never got that good at it but I felt like such a cool kid and I was all "blah blah blah yeah I surf" for several years after the fact, lol.
Pretty much I was just repeating some absurd mishaps I had while trying to pull off the whole yeah-I'm-a-surfer-chick thing when I had to have been, oh, thirteen or so, and I said something about how it was the first summer I had owned a two piece bathing suit and I was so excited to wear it and then I scraped my stomach up really badly on some shells or something, I dunno, I was pretty much a klutz in the ocean no matter what I was doing, but then Jury said something about my cousin, and we got to talking about my other cousin, the one who still lives around here, and then all of a sudden Bevan was like, "wait a minute, Ryan is your cousin?"
And I'm just like, yeah, haha, everybody knows my cousin Ryan, of course Bevan would know him too. Everyone seems to know everyone else here - Bevan and Erica went to public high school together, Jury and my other cousin went to Catholic school together, whatever.
No no. There is more to it than that. I went surfing many times when I was at the shore. But that particular summer, whichever summer it was, I would go every evening with my cousin and his friends. I would take my dad's old surfboard from my grandparent's attic and they would make fun of it because it was old (but awesome) and then we would put the boards back in the van (I'm thinking my older cousin was driving us around...?) and then go out on the boardwalk and walk back and forth up and down all night being stupid teenagers and getting into dumb shit, like sitting on the railing smoking cigarettes and having boardwalk security shoo us off the railings and try to tell us that if we kept sitting up there we weren't allowed back on the boardwalk, and hanging out in "that pavilion" where all the cool kids would hang out, all the skaters and we-wish-we-were-skaters and we're-pretending-we're-hippies and stuff, and, oh, we would talk about doing magic mushrooms but not actually do them, and stuff like that.
That was also the summer that I discovered eyeshadow, and I distinctly recall making sure I put on blue, green, and purple eyeshadow in the back of the van before going up to the boardwalk and thinking that my hair looked pretty awesome after having been soaked in salt water and then dried in salt air and I didn't want to wash it and then I'd wake up with sand in my bed the next day.
Yeah so that particular summer, whichever summer it was (we're still in disagreement about the actual year), me hanging out with Ryan and his friends? That included Bevan.
The first time I met Bevan was not when I applied for a job at the restaurant and was sitting at a bar table waiting for a manager to come look at my application and Bevan gave me a Coke to drink.
The first time I met Bevan was when I was twelve or thirteen and here for a few weeks in the summer and playing at being one of the cool kids.
I did not realize this.
He did not realize this either, it seems, because it was just tonight that he realized that Ryan is my cousin. And then we had this moment were we were like, wait, that was you that one time that year that we can't even decide what year it was?
But it was definitely both of us. Cause I distinctly recall being in the pavilion on the boardwalk and listening to this guy play this song on a guitar about "everyone getting high except Winnie the Pooh" and then singing it randomly for the rest of the week. Bevan remembered that too when I brought it up. So we were both definitely there hanging out those two weeks like over ten years ago. And he remembers me scraping my stomach up on the shells, too.
I had a little trouble wrapping my head around this - like, really, I forgot someone that completely? Really? Cause even after I thought back and had no problem remembering spending the whole two weeks with them, and surfing and hanging around on the boardwalk and thinking I was so freaking cool (not to mention so grown up) the actual people I was with were still kind of fuzzy. There was Ryan, obviously, and there was Ryan's neighbor Will, and then there was another guy. Bevan was the other guy, I guess. And I tried really, really hard to think of what I could remember, specifically, about him, because even though I had the knowledge that it must have been him, it still wasn't really clicking in my head.
The other guy didn't really talk to me much. I remember thinking I should have a crush on Will and I remember thinking how alike me and Ryan were so much that it seemed like we could be siblings rather than cousins. But the other guy?
So me and Bevan are kind of just staring half at each other and half off into space trying to really reconcile this - I kinda think he was having the same thought process as me - yes, there was a summer where he spent two weeks hanging out with Ryan and his cousin when she was in town on vacation, and they went surfing after dinner and then hung around on the boardwalk every night. Yes, they went to a movie one night. Yes, they hung out in "that pavilion" and yes, they hung out in the Surf Mall and yes, they talked about doing magic mushrooms like it was the coolest thing ever, and yes, they smoked cigarettes and sat on the railing and got hassled by security. But I'm thinking he had as much trouble actually connecting that to me as I was having connecting all that to him.
The other guy... wore a Phillies hat all the time, except in the ocean. I do remember that. And we had to have been only thirteen or so, and he was really short, much shorter than me. Well, Bevan is taller than me now but for a guy he's still pretty short. He always wanted to go in the arcades and play the games with the guns as opposed to, like, air hockey or something I liked to play. And I remember at one point I noticed his teeth and thought, "well, this kid is going to get braces in a few years," cause his teeth had like spaces between them I guess. And... that's kind of funny because when I met Bevan for the first time last summer, in the restaurant, he was really quiet but I kept trying to talk to him while I was waiting for the manager to come look at my application, and eventually I got him to smile, and I sort of thought the same thing, like, "wow, I guess this guy never had braces."
Which... I guess sounds kind of stupid and shallow and superficial maybe, but my defense for that is that I had braces twice, once for two years and once for four years and it was pretty miserable and I tend to notice people's teeth, I suppose. My teeth look pretty much perfect, and you know what, they fucking better, because having a mouth full of all kinds of foreign material is so not fun. And... I grew up in an area where most families were really well off - if you didn't have perfect teeth, you got braces. It was pretty much just a fact, not that big of a deal. It was more unusual to see someone with odd-looking teeth than to see someone with braces.
It's not really like that here... just another one of those tiny differences between there and here that makes this place not home, no matter how familiar I am with it, no matter how detailed of a map I could draw you of this whole freakin island, and that was before I actually moved here - ANYWAY. I AM GETTING SO OFF TOPIC.
I thought those two weeks I spent here were so much fun that summer, and I went home with all kinds of boardwalk-bought clothes and jewelry and stuff and was ready to tell everyone that I spent the whole summer surfing (lol two weeks, in reality) and I thought I was just so cool and that of course, of course the next summer it would be exactly the same, except even better, cause we would be even older - it didn't happen that way. The next summer, Ryan had a job - I guess at his uncle's pizza place, same place Jury worked, or maybe she even still works there in the summer, I'm not sure. But I hardly saw him that summer, just one night at dinner with my parents and his parents. And I haven't seen Ryan in years now, he moved on from chasing waves to chasing mountains and he kind of floats from resort to resort snowboarding and then popping home to crash with my aunt and uncle for a bit, work his ass off and save up more money, and then taking off again.
I still can't figure out which summer this actually was. In my head, the movie we went to see was Forrest Gump, but it couldn't have been, cause I was way too young. I was in elementary school, and that wasn't it, cause no way would my parents have let me run off with Ryan and his friends if I was that young -well, they might have, but they wouldn't have let me go surfing without a parent on the beach watching out for us, not that young. And I wouldn't have been wearing striped eyeshadow, either :P
Bevan says we saw Trainspotting, in fact, he insists that it was that, no question about it, which would make sense, but I could have sworn I saw Trainspotting at home.
It's so weird how some things are completely clear, like I can see the sneakers I was wearing - I had silver converse one-stars with glow-in-the-dark laces, and I can see the frayed bottoms of my jeans and I can see the dusty blue-ish paint on the benches in the pavilion and I can remember so clearly thinking how cool I was putting my eyeshadow on in the back of the van... but you'd think I'd remember something like seeing a rated-R movie when I was thirteen - that's what cool kids do, right?
I don't think we saw Trainspotting. I think we saw Men In Black. Cause I was already obsessed with aliens and had an alien t-shirt that also glowed in the dark and made a point to wear it when I knew we might be somewhere... dark... you know, so it would glow...
So really, I suppose me and Bevan have known each other for about ten years now :P I'd like to say this is why I felt so comfortable talking to him, and I'd like to say this is why he's pretty much the first real friend I made here, as opposed to just, you know, someone to hang around with randomly, but, honestly, we didn't remember each other. I didn't and he didn't. The totally dumbfounded gaping from both of us when we realized that we had already known each other is a pretty good indication of that.
"I'm always okay."
Well, I worked all weekend. All. Freakin. Weekend. Including Saturday morning at 5am (Saturday is not my day to work at the Coffee Co) at the Coffee Co in town instead of the one on the boardwalk. Mine and Erica's dinner did not happen - I do not have cream cheese - and in fact I have not seen Erica all weekend either. Bevan and Jury came over to my house after Bevan got off work and we had a few beers out on the porch. That was actually pretty nice. I've got a great porch. And since Erica wasn't around, there were no weird Bevan/Erica vibes going on. But that was Thursday. I didn't go out all weekend or have anyone over or do anything remotely cool - well, I did see Doctor Who. That counts, right?
So today I worked this morning at the Coffee Co. Then I got called in to work again this afternoon, also at the Coffee Co, cause, I dunno, I guess someone else called out. And who came in for some coffee? Oh, Bevan and Jury. Apparently they were out surfing in the evening and decided to come up on the boardwalk afterwards.
I always thought Bevan surfed early in the morning - I guess he does surf early in the morning, I mean, the Coffee Co in town is on his way home and he used to stop in there a couple times a week after surfing. I guess he probably still stops in there a few times a week, it's just that I'm not there. But anyway, I know what he likes to drink, he likes to have a large vanilla cappuccino with a tiny splash of almond in it too. So they said they were picking up dinner near where my house is so I asked if they'd wait fifteen minutes for me to get off and then take me home, and we ended up all picking up sandwiches and coming back to my house, and then we took the sandwiches and some beer out to the beach and sat on the blanket for a bit and that was pretty nice.
So I guess people who live here do go out on the beach, just not during peak beach hours or something. I don't know. I haven't really figured it out - maybe there is nothing to figure out. Some people insist they haven't even seen the ocean in years even if they only live a few blocks away, and then there's people like Erica who want to go out on the beach all the time at all hours of the day. I guess everyone is different.
So, let's see, how did the conversation start... I think Jury was talking about it having been a while since she last tried to surf (I got the impression that she isn't very good) and somehow I then got to talking about me trying to learn to surf when I was a kid. I know I've mentioned before that my family lives here - I've got two aunts and uncles who live nearby and one cousin still, but when I was a kid all my cousins lived here and so did my grandparents, and my family spent a whole lot of time here. I have one cousin who is the same age as me, and we would usually hang out whenever my family was in the area. Also, that same cousin always worked at his uncle's pizza shop in town - not my uncle, his uncle on the other side, the one who isn't related to me at all. Jury worked there as well - I think she's maybe two years younger than I am, but, anyway, she knows my cousin from working there.
So I was saying how I would go to the beach with my cousins in the summer and we would go boogie boarding, and that one summer, I forget really which one, but it was probably a combination of several summers, when we were a little older, like twelve and thirteen and maybe fourteen or so, that we'd either get up real early or go out on the beach later in the evening and he would try to teach me to surf, which I thought was so cool cause people who surf are definitely cool and that there was one summer in particular that me and him and his friends went almost every night for, oh, like two weeks straight and I never got that good at it but I felt like such a cool kid and I was all "blah blah blah yeah I surf" for several years after the fact, lol.
Pretty much I was just repeating some absurd mishaps I had while trying to pull off the whole yeah-I'm-a-surfer-chick thing when I had to have been, oh, thirteen or so, and I said something about how it was the first summer I had owned a two piece bathing suit and I was so excited to wear it and then I scraped my stomach up really badly on some shells or something, I dunno, I was pretty much a klutz in the ocean no matter what I was doing, but then Jury said something about my cousin, and we got to talking about my other cousin, the one who still lives around here, and then all of a sudden Bevan was like, "wait a minute, Ryan is your cousin?"
And I'm just like, yeah, haha, everybody knows my cousin Ryan, of course Bevan would know him too. Everyone seems to know everyone else here - Bevan and Erica went to public high school together, Jury and my other cousin went to Catholic school together, whatever.
No no. There is more to it than that. I went surfing many times when I was at the shore. But that particular summer, whichever summer it was, I would go every evening with my cousin and his friends. I would take my dad's old surfboard from my grandparent's attic and they would make fun of it because it was old (but awesome) and then we would put the boards back in the van (I'm thinking my older cousin was driving us around...?) and then go out on the boardwalk and walk back and forth up and down all night being stupid teenagers and getting into dumb shit, like sitting on the railing smoking cigarettes and having boardwalk security shoo us off the railings and try to tell us that if we kept sitting up there we weren't allowed back on the boardwalk, and hanging out in "that pavilion" where all the cool kids would hang out, all the skaters and we-wish-we-were-skaters and we're-pretending-we're-hippies and stuff, and, oh, we would talk about doing magic mushrooms but not actually do them, and stuff like that.
That was also the summer that I discovered eyeshadow, and I distinctly recall making sure I put on blue, green, and purple eyeshadow in the back of the van before going up to the boardwalk and thinking that my hair looked pretty awesome after having been soaked in salt water and then dried in salt air and I didn't want to wash it and then I'd wake up with sand in my bed the next day.
Yeah so that particular summer, whichever summer it was (we're still in disagreement about the actual year), me hanging out with Ryan and his friends? That included Bevan.
The first time I met Bevan was not when I applied for a job at the restaurant and was sitting at a bar table waiting for a manager to come look at my application and Bevan gave me a Coke to drink.
The first time I met Bevan was when I was twelve or thirteen and here for a few weeks in the summer and playing at being one of the cool kids.
I did not realize this.
He did not realize this either, it seems, because it was just tonight that he realized that Ryan is my cousin. And then we had this moment were we were like, wait, that was you that one time that year that we can't even decide what year it was?
But it was definitely both of us. Cause I distinctly recall being in the pavilion on the boardwalk and listening to this guy play this song on a guitar about "everyone getting high except Winnie the Pooh" and then singing it randomly for the rest of the week. Bevan remembered that too when I brought it up. So we were both definitely there hanging out those two weeks like over ten years ago. And he remembers me scraping my stomach up on the shells, too.
I had a little trouble wrapping my head around this - like, really, I forgot someone that completely? Really? Cause even after I thought back and had no problem remembering spending the whole two weeks with them, and surfing and hanging around on the boardwalk and thinking I was so freaking cool (not to mention so grown up) the actual people I was with were still kind of fuzzy. There was Ryan, obviously, and there was Ryan's neighbor Will, and then there was another guy. Bevan was the other guy, I guess. And I tried really, really hard to think of what I could remember, specifically, about him, because even though I had the knowledge that it must have been him, it still wasn't really clicking in my head.
The other guy didn't really talk to me much. I remember thinking I should have a crush on Will and I remember thinking how alike me and Ryan were so much that it seemed like we could be siblings rather than cousins. But the other guy?
So me and Bevan are kind of just staring half at each other and half off into space trying to really reconcile this - I kinda think he was having the same thought process as me - yes, there was a summer where he spent two weeks hanging out with Ryan and his cousin when she was in town on vacation, and they went surfing after dinner and then hung around on the boardwalk every night. Yes, they went to a movie one night. Yes, they hung out in "that pavilion" and yes, they hung out in the Surf Mall and yes, they talked about doing magic mushrooms like it was the coolest thing ever, and yes, they smoked cigarettes and sat on the railing and got hassled by security. But I'm thinking he had as much trouble actually connecting that to me as I was having connecting all that to him.
The other guy... wore a Phillies hat all the time, except in the ocean. I do remember that. And we had to have been only thirteen or so, and he was really short, much shorter than me. Well, Bevan is taller than me now but for a guy he's still pretty short. He always wanted to go in the arcades and play the games with the guns as opposed to, like, air hockey or something I liked to play. And I remember at one point I noticed his teeth and thought, "well, this kid is going to get braces in a few years," cause his teeth had like spaces between them I guess. And... that's kind of funny because when I met Bevan for the first time last summer, in the restaurant, he was really quiet but I kept trying to talk to him while I was waiting for the manager to come look at my application, and eventually I got him to smile, and I sort of thought the same thing, like, "wow, I guess this guy never had braces."
Which... I guess sounds kind of stupid and shallow and superficial maybe, but my defense for that is that I had braces twice, once for two years and once for four years and it was pretty miserable and I tend to notice people's teeth, I suppose. My teeth look pretty much perfect, and you know what, they fucking better, because having a mouth full of all kinds of foreign material is so not fun. And... I grew up in an area where most families were really well off - if you didn't have perfect teeth, you got braces. It was pretty much just a fact, not that big of a deal. It was more unusual to see someone with odd-looking teeth than to see someone with braces.
It's not really like that here... just another one of those tiny differences between there and here that makes this place not home, no matter how familiar I am with it, no matter how detailed of a map I could draw you of this whole freakin island, and that was before I actually moved here - ANYWAY. I AM GETTING SO OFF TOPIC.
I thought those two weeks I spent here were so much fun that summer, and I went home with all kinds of boardwalk-bought clothes and jewelry and stuff and was ready to tell everyone that I spent the whole summer surfing (lol two weeks, in reality) and I thought I was just so cool and that of course, of course the next summer it would be exactly the same, except even better, cause we would be even older - it didn't happen that way. The next summer, Ryan had a job - I guess at his uncle's pizza place, same place Jury worked, or maybe she even still works there in the summer, I'm not sure. But I hardly saw him that summer, just one night at dinner with my parents and his parents. And I haven't seen Ryan in years now, he moved on from chasing waves to chasing mountains and he kind of floats from resort to resort snowboarding and then popping home to crash with my aunt and uncle for a bit, work his ass off and save up more money, and then taking off again.
I still can't figure out which summer this actually was. In my head, the movie we went to see was Forrest Gump, but it couldn't have been, cause I was way too young. I was in elementary school, and that wasn't it, cause no way would my parents have let me run off with Ryan and his friends if I was that young -well, they might have, but they wouldn't have let me go surfing without a parent on the beach watching out for us, not that young. And I wouldn't have been wearing striped eyeshadow, either :P
Bevan says we saw Trainspotting, in fact, he insists that it was that, no question about it, which would make sense, but I could have sworn I saw Trainspotting at home.
It's so weird how some things are completely clear, like I can see the sneakers I was wearing - I had silver converse one-stars with glow-in-the-dark laces, and I can see the frayed bottoms of my jeans and I can see the dusty blue-ish paint on the benches in the pavilion and I can remember so clearly thinking how cool I was putting my eyeshadow on in the back of the van... but you'd think I'd remember something like seeing a rated-R movie when I was thirteen - that's what cool kids do, right?
I don't think we saw Trainspotting. I think we saw Men In Black. Cause I was already obsessed with aliens and had an alien t-shirt that also glowed in the dark and made a point to wear it when I knew we might be somewhere... dark... you know, so it would glow...
So really, I suppose me and Bevan have known each other for about ten years now :P I'd like to say this is why I felt so comfortable talking to him, and I'd like to say this is why he's pretty much the first real friend I made here, as opposed to just, you know, someone to hang around with randomly, but, honestly, we didn't remember each other. I didn't and he didn't. The totally dumbfounded gaping from both of us when we realized that we had already known each other is a pretty good indication of that.
