All through 1993, you could feel things changing. January – Democratic President for the first time since I was in third grade. February – moved on to my fifth roommate in three years in undergrad. March – 13 inches of snow and preachers on the radio trying to assure their listeners that the blizzard was not God’s judgement. April – my first grad school official visit, to Emory (how different would things have been had I been apprenticed to Abramowitz?) and in May – the delivery of the 1993 Saturn SC2, aquamarine, that would eventually become Danny and would someday finish its career parked on a side street in Silicon Valley. But I digress.
June was change, but the wrong kind – I was back to the produce cooler. Yup, three years of undergrad at what was allegedly the finest institution of higher learning in the state and I was right back to doing the same job I did in the summer between tenth and eleventh grade. I didn’t have a lick of sense, of course; I should have been scrounging for a temp agency that could give me a nice air-conditioned berth in front of a PC (yes, folks, in 1993 I still had yet to become a Mac user) but instead I was right back to stacking bananas – at least we no longer shrink-wrapped a dozen cases of iceberg lettuce every morning.
This was the year that I went all-in on the NFL preseason for the first time. My collection of hats and jerseys and Nikes was starting to hit critical mass, and a family vacation to the Smokies was spent perusing NFL preview magazines and looking in on any and every preseason game ESPN aired. My beloved Redskins were looking at their first season After Gibbs, but nobody was worried – Richie Pettitbone, master of defense, was taking the controls and everything looked to be A-OK.*
I guess I never really paid attention to the NFL. The first Super Bowl I remember being cognizant of was when the Redskins beat the Dolphins, but I don’t remember watching it – that didn’t happen until the Super Bowl Shuffle-era Chicago Bears made a big enough splash that even a skinny nerd knew who the Fridge was (even if I had no idea what position he played – confusion made worse whenever Ditka lined him up as a running back).
The really funny thing was that this was right about the time that the Indigo Girls album “Rites of Passage” finally showed up in my collection. I was a little behind, obviously, but I was banging that tape through the Walkman on a loop for most of the summer, largely because “Ghost” was evocative – for the obvious reasons, but ones made worse by the fact that I was sending letters back and forth with the girl who would become Horrible. Yes, I was still technically with She Whose Name We Do Not Speak (and I was on that tip YEARS before J. K. Rowling), but She was working on the summer theater program in town and busily laying pipe with a stagehand while I was feeling guilty about how good it felt to get a letter back, so in retrospect I regret none of my conduct. Obviously I regret ever getting entangled with Horrible, but that’s a whole separate decade of sending a therapist’s kids to Harvard on a jewel-encrusted camel.
August 1993 was the first time it really occurred to me that you could go up in the mountains, someplace green and leafy, and it wasn’t nearly as godawful hot. It was a revelation almost as transforming as the 2002 realization that you could do that at sea level if only you went to Silicon Valley…
So there it is. Calm before the storm, more or less, or the lull waiting for the regeneration to finish maybe. By August, I would be out of the produce and working for the Dean’s office, ramping up for senior year – which was more eventful than the previous three years combined, but that’s another story altogether.
* A-OK = 4-12. Disastrous. Of course, the Skins turned in the same record this past season, so you can see what kind of decade(s) we’ve had…