Flashback, part 84 of n

Last night I went out for ice cream. Well not ice cream – as I am currently on a restricted diet keeping the dairy away – but I was pulling into the parking lot outside Baskin-Robbins for Daquiri Ice at about 9 PM, and it was still unpleasantly warm out, and I had the windows down, and Axl Rose was singing “all we need is just a little patience” on the 90s satellite station, and it felt for just a moment like walking around in the surveillance footage from twenty-five years earlier.

Undergrad lasted almost ’til Memorial Day weekend, basically, not like grad school at Vanderbilt where you were done by the first weekend of May. So down the stretch in late April into May there were a lot of overly warm nights when you just wanted to get away. There was a Baskin-Robbins down US 78 in Forestdale or thereabouts. If you kept going, there was a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Jasper that was open 24 hours. A drive, someplace open, something to do at stupid o’clock at night at a time when I was just beginning to keep proper vampire hours in a way that wouldn’t end until I moved to California.

My first car – the Monte Carlo I pushed from high school all the way through the end of my junior year – had glass T-tops, which seem like a good idea until you realize that 1) they’re hell to remove and put back quickly 2) they get stolen easily so you need locking handle covers which make things even worse 3) they basically make your car a greenhouse. So it was a lot more pleasant to take the car out when the sun was down and the velour seats weren’t holding the sun’s warmth any more. Aftermarket car stereo plugged into the same shitty factory speakers, girlfriend – whenever possible – left to her own devices, whatever they were. By spring, neither of the college girlfriends were the person I wanted to be around.

So off we go. Jamocha almond fudge ice cream, two scoops, sugar cone. Examine whatever new Super Soaker variant had arrived for the summer. Reflect on the fact that I wanted to have the water guns in case a battle broke out in the dorms, knowing one never had and one never would, and laying the seeds in my mind for contemplating “wanting to need the things you want” or realizing I’d botched the college thing for good. Look and see what kind of wacky soda variants were starting to crop up in the gas station coolers. Fill the tank for $20, when such a thing was still possible.

1993 and 1994 were different, though. In 1993, there was the promise that something different was on the horizon, that undergrad would be done this time next year, that there was the possibility of something else, that this – whatever this was – wasn’t forever. And in 1994, the prospect of going away to Vanderbilt, getting a fresh start, basically punting everything for the last three months of college because my fellowship was stitched up and all I had to do at this point was not lose my mind trying to deal with a certain nut job. Better days guaranteed coming, if I just hung on.

In retrospect, I didn’t appreciate that like I should have. Better days guaranteed isn’t something that comes along very often in life. I was blessed – not in the modern hashtag Instagram #blessed sense, but in the fact that I had been given something that in retrospect I really didn’t appreciate and probably didn’t deserve: a second chance. A make-good on four years of blight. The opportunity to know that I could drop the keys in the mailbox and walk away without consequence into a better situation. Not the right one, as it would turn out, but that would come later and for many reasons. But in 1994, I could perch on the new leather upholstery of the Saturn SC2, drum my fingers on the wheel, and imagine a bright future at the end of the road.

Plus, the melting ice cream was a lot easier to wipe off the leather.

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