Connecting The Dots - Part 1

I was going to make a really bad attempt at humor today. The plan was to talk about my experience with a colonoscopy a few weeks ago. This was going to be the "I got anal probed in my sleep and I wasn't even abducted by aliens" post, but I've since thought better of that. Lucky you.

Instead let me tell you a tale. A tale of how I got to here. I call it connecting the dots. Milan Kundera called it "The Seven Unlikely Events Without Which We Would Never Have Fallen In Love" (thank you Haven.) Usually I play the game backwards where I'll start with a person and end up with how we got to be connected. This time I'll start at the beginning and work my way forward.

Pretty much everything starts with my father's death. I was twelve years and two days old when the accident happened. It was a violent end to a man's life who could no longer control the hold alcohol had on his life. Or for that matter the hold it had on our lives as his family. We're told that out of every ending there is a new beginning. I don't believe that is entirely true for everyone involved. Sometimes and ending is just that and things move in the path that they have already started on. Like a game of billiards, the trajectory of one ball can affect the motion and direction of the other balls on the table. But some of them are never touched by the action and so remain rooted where they are. Luckily for me, I was one of the balls in the path.

A few years after dad's passing, when I was fifteen, a church elder named Mark took me under his wing to be a father figure in my life. He knew that I didn't have any grandfathers living and that dad had passed.Mark  decided that he would be a surrogate grandfather to me. He would take me on errands with him in the summer. He let me drive his AMC Matador on old back country roads and talked me into attending a church camp that summer. It was something that I hadn't wanted to attend the year before or even that year, but Mark thought it would be good for me.

Great. Spend a week in a musty cabin out in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of strangers. Gang showers in the bathroom, no doors on the stalls, and I'm 15 and I'm becoming increasingly attracted to guys. I'm not admitting it yet, but it's there in the back of my consciousness. Sign me up! I couldn't think of any possible scenario that could have been worse, but I couldn't come up with a reason not to go other than "I don't want to" which wasn't flying with anyone. Mom wanted us out of the house for the week. The pastor at our church was trying to save our heathen hides and David was trying to gain my trust. I was, in a word, screwed.

So, the pastor loads us up in his van, drives us to somewhere south of Terre Haute to an old Bible College that had been converted into a summer camp for Christian teens. Only one building remained of the original college. Cabins, a swimming pool and a dining hall had been added to the grounds over the years. It was depressing. No TV, no books other than our bibles and no escape. We had absolutely no alone time except for after vespers and before bed time.

My bunk mate was a few years younger than me and was attending with his two sisters and brother. His name, coincidentally was also a Mark. As the week progressed, we became closer and closer, staying up late at night talking about the people we had met and the days' events. My brother became even closer to his younger sister and would take the evening walk with her along "lover's lane" which was just a big circular path through the grounds.

The week ended and we said many goodbyes to the people we had become friends with in that short time. Mark and I stayed in contact sporadically, gradually tapering off communication over the next few years. With college looming on the horizon, I thought it was one of those friendships that would stay back in childhood.

Then I was accepted to Ball State University. My brother did the mapping out of our route to my freshman orientation. I started late and it was only a one day event - or non-event since it was pretty much watching a slide show and signing me up for classes. He discovered that the town Mark and his sisters lived in was just north of Muncie. My brother still had a crush on Mark's younger sister and got their phone number and arranged for us to meet up. They had an older sister my age who was at the camp that summer I met Mark, but I didn't remember her.

It was arranged so that we would go on a double date because the younger sister wasn't old enough yet to date on her own. Again, lucky me. Our first date (double date) was at an Arby's where we all met up after my orientation sessions. And there the groundwork was prepared for an on again, off again relationship with the older sister that would end badly (for the sixth time in nine months) when I realized that I was more attracted to Mark than I was to her. And, no, I didn't tell her that was the reason. Her immaturity was the reason I ended the relationship. Seriously. Six breakups in nine months. Way too much drama for this small town boy.

(to be continued)