2010-10-20 - 6:33 p.m.
Just now, waiting for my expensive coffee to get made and poured, three guys caught my attention. They sat at a table in the cafe here, not eating or drinking anything, instead only playing cards. I knew enough to know what game they were playing. I don't know anything about the game but I assume it involves wizards and dragons and quests and dice. I remember it from when I was in college and I was comforted to see that the same kinds of boys play this game now as the boys who played it then.
I'm not proud of this, but my first reaction upon seeing these boys play their card game was pity. Or, if I were more honest, mild hostility. But, why? These boys needed none of that. Each wore unfashionable jeans, uncool running-type shoes, strange goatees, whatever-may-come haircuts. Each, hopped up on soda or science-fiction or the card game or each other, flexed one of his legs fast, rhythmically, incessantly: the knee bobbing up and down, up and down, very fast. Two of them kept their cards in cellophane sleeves, to protect them.
This all happened very fast, this about-face. My coffee was still getting made and poured. Because then I thought: why pity them? Why feel anything at all toward them other than love? Or, if not love, something like it, something that smells like recognition. Because who am I kidding? Of course I spent hours and hours in that cold, unfinished basement when I was too old for it--fourteen?--gluing model airplane parts together, mixing greens to get just the right kind of green for a 1943 B-17 Stratofortress. I didn't get into the cards, but I could've. I had soccer and baseball but I played in the school band. I tore through choose-your-own-adventures and dozens of Hardy Boys and my mom told me recently that she was worried about me when I was that age. Not because of how skinny I was, not because of the braces on my teeth or the eyesight that was going, but because of the comic books. I was buying too many comic books, she thought, staying up too late to read them, going over to friends' houses too often for the sole purpose of becoming more familiar with more comic books, more colors, more bizarre characters, more giant words in giant bubbles.
So, weird kids, nerdy kids, bad-jeans kids: I see you. It'll be all right. You'll keep on being weird or you'll mellow out at some point. Perhaps some girl will run her long hair across your neck, across your face one sweaty night, and it'll all change. If that's what you want, if the absence of the feeling of that hair on your chest is what's keeping those legs pumping, it'll happen. But don't stop playing that game. A few years ago, and I don't remember what I had done to make him say this, but a good friend said to me, "You're strange." And I thought for a moment and said, "I've been trying." And he said, "Me, too."
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