Younger Than X

In my house by candlelight during the storms. Photo by me, May 2025.

 

The night sky turned blue twice and there was an explosion. A nearby transformer exploded during the storms and the electricity went out. Saturday it rained, Sunday it rained and Monday and Tuesday too. Four and a half inches of rain fell and it was nice. Banking up the rain before summer sets in and the inevitable gaps between storms that will lead to dry spells was good fortune.

Sunday evening in traffic between the storms, there was a sign that maybe rock is not utterly dead among the lettered generations younger than X. The car next to me, windows down, blasted Nirvana's Lithium. The driver was either in his late teens or early twenties. Hope lives in the bangs of those born this century that maybe they can have their own guitar hero who is not dead or is not classic rock. I listened to the Doors and Hendix and Janis at that age, so I understand.

Maybe I can accept the Jins as another sign of hope? Let me introduce those younger than X to the Pixies and you are welcome.

Two weeks ago I ran into someone who I had not seen for thirty-four years. I was at a garden nursery on another Sunday afternoon when I recognized the unmistakable posture of someone I had known quite well in high school. I turned to the person I was with and whispered, “I know him,” and discreetly pointed at a guy in his early fifties dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved tee shirt.

It was the shoulders rolled forward, the walking on his tiptoes and the lean of his onion-shaped body that gave him away. The chubby-cheeked face was the same as I remembered too, plus some additional lines and sags beneath the eyes and on his jawline. For only the second time ever, in the years since my schooling ended in Paulding County, when I encountered someone from the long-ago past, I always spoke; I avoided the person. I turned the other way into the crowd and hoped that he had not recognized me from ten feet away. I had no ill feelings for him, but there was no wish to reconnect either. I live approximately a hundred miles and an hour and a half away with light traffic from where I grew up and do not expect to run into people I knew as a kid, but I guess it was inevitable that it would happen close to home. 

 

The other time was in 1995 at Emory University. I was twenty-two, living in the city in an old factory, hooked on Pansy Division, ear ring wearing (see the cover of my novel Shadow's Gravity), fully out of the closet and rejecting anything or one from the past. I was attending a gay themed play and among the audience was a girl I went to school with from elementary to high school. I was not shocked to see her with other females in that setting, but it was the first time I ran into another person from Paulding County at a gay event.  I slid down in my seat and buried myself in the program until the lights went down.

Generally, I welcome reunions with old friends in person (I've had a number that I've mostly enjoyed) or on the internet. This time, I did not care for the glory days of youth chitchat that always happens or learning how or if he had changed. He did not interest me much then and I doubted he would have now. I also did not want him to know that we lived near each other so that there would be no dropping by my house unannounced either.

In my last few reunions there has been another topic of discussion added: did you hear that so-and-so died?

My answer is usually a surprised no. I do not expect people my age to be dying or even to have bad health. I know it is possible, but it should be the exception.

Back to work on the next novel.