Having successfully traveled from Tennessee, through Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York all without traffic, you can imagine my dismay when 5 minutes into Connecticut I was standing still on the Merritt Parkway. I was close to my final destination, but not close enough. I know it's ridiculous to get mad at inanimate objects, but I went ahead and got irate with not just an inanimate object, but a concept: the state of Connecticut. It was a good thing I saved the last day for my shortest amount of travel.
I visited friends, family and attended the wedding we had come so far to attend.
I made new friends and promised said new friends a youtube video on how to "twerk". On Sunday I persuaded my BFF (best friend forever) to come to my in laws house and sit by their pool. On Monday I decided to stick around an extra day rather than hit the road and hang out with my BFF. Hanging out with my BFF meant a day in New Haven, CT, a place for which I have very mixed emotions.
"Going home" to New Haven is great. The restaurants are amazing, I get to clown around with my best friend, the weather is mild and beautiful and I appreciate the New England scene in a way I never could when I lived there. However, the entire time I'm in New Haven I have a mild to moderate anxiety attack because New Haven brings reminds me of many terrible times in my life as well as bittersweet memories. I'm a very sensory oriented person, so something as slight as a smell can have me time traveling against my will to the past.
So I'm trying to keep my cool as me and my friend are walking through Yale University on the Main Street of New Haven. As we walk past the Yale Center for British Art I see a guy playing guitar where there is always a guy playing guitar with his guitar case open for tips. We walk past the man and I give him a good stare to see if I know him, because I often know the guy playing the guitar in this spot.
"Bill"! I yelled. "Bill"!
Bill was a beacon of light in my life when my life was pitch black. He was a pillar of stability at a point when I was about to hit a rock bottom that would last for years. The man had been my blanky.
I was about 20 and he was 40ish and we both worked in a really nice restaurant. He was a cook and I was a waitress. I was also a hot mess. My relationship with Bill was not remotely sexual. He never once told me I was beautiful or pretty and I loved that about him. We were just friends, bonded by a similar sense of humor and our own weird brand of introversion.
I needed Bill because I was more or less estranged from normal people at the time. I was dating a maniac and had lost any meaningful contact with sane people and my family. I felt alienated and hopeless. I was solving my problems with alcohol which was in fact not solving my problems, but instead creating much more complicated ones.
During this grim time, the high point of my day was dragging my ass to work and hanging out with Bill before the restaurant got busy. Every day the restaurant provided a staff meal for which it was Bill's job to concoct. At the time my diet consisted mostly of cigarettes and coffee, so the staff meal would usually be my first meal of the day. The restaurant menu consisted of fancy ass American food like Ostrich (the leanest red meat there is!) and braised haricot vert (just french green beans people). As a vegetarian and a newbie to bougie food I was completely uninterested in these types of offerings.
Because Bill and I were good buddies, to my delight and everyone else's' chagrin, the staff meal often turned out being the cheesiest, most luxurious mac and cheese in New Haven. Bill wouldn't keep me from hitting rock bottom and he never got in my business. But he was respite for me. Bill accepted me for who I was, knew I was in trouble and fed me comfort food.
He was a quirky dude too. He was a recovering alcoholic who owned a zen state of mind I didn't even bother to aspire to. His mental health was completely out of my league but he was a great example. He had a wonderful sense of humor and was friends with all the dishwashers and Mexican guys in the kitchen. He would incorporate their Spanglish phrases into his own speech. Instead of saying "why not?" the Mexican guys would say "why no"? He got a big kick out of this error so when you would ask Bill a question and the answer was yes, he would put both hands up and casually say "why no" as he calmly turned and walked away to do whatever had been asked of him. Bill's use of the phrase made me laugh and to this day I say use the phrase myself.
So, there was Bill playing guitar on the street. At first, I feared the worst, that he had gone back to drinking. He couldn't be, I stammered to myself. He was so perfect, he was so solid. As soon as I locked into his eyes I knew I hadn't lost him. They were clear and blue and he was as calm and collected as he had ever been. He told me he had gotten out of the restaurant business, because it was full of maniacs and he was working at a visiting nurse association, which suited his disposition perfectly. He was still married to the same person and during the summers his work was slow so he played guitar on the street and made o.k. money doing it. He looked great. I hadn't seen him in over 10 years and he looked like he hadn't aged. I was so happy to see him and so very happy for him to see that I had made it and was finally doing well. It felt like a happy ending for both of us and through our interaction I realized there was still hope. Hope that good can stay good and that the old scary memories could be replaced with fresh new ones. After seeing Bill I strolled the streets of New Haven with a confidence and a bounce to my step. Bill was still keeping it together and I would too. Bill's Zen-like stability was no longer an unrealistic goal for this former street urchin. We had both made it.
I visited friends, family and attended the wedding we had come so far to attend.
I made new friends and promised said new friends a youtube video on how to "twerk". On Sunday I persuaded my BFF (best friend forever) to come to my in laws house and sit by their pool. On Monday I decided to stick around an extra day rather than hit the road and hang out with my BFF. Hanging out with my BFF meant a day in New Haven, CT, a place for which I have very mixed emotions.
"Going home" to New Haven is great. The restaurants are amazing, I get to clown around with my best friend, the weather is mild and beautiful and I appreciate the New England scene in a way I never could when I lived there. However, the entire time I'm in New Haven I have a mild to moderate anxiety attack because New Haven brings reminds me of many terrible times in my life as well as bittersweet memories. I'm a very sensory oriented person, so something as slight as a smell can have me time traveling against my will to the past.
So I'm trying to keep my cool as me and my friend are walking through Yale University on the Main Street of New Haven. As we walk past the Yale Center for British Art I see a guy playing guitar where there is always a guy playing guitar with his guitar case open for tips. We walk past the man and I give him a good stare to see if I know him, because I often know the guy playing the guitar in this spot.
"Bill"! I yelled. "Bill"!
Bill was a beacon of light in my life when my life was pitch black. He was a pillar of stability at a point when I was about to hit a rock bottom that would last for years. The man had been my blanky.
I was about 20 and he was 40ish and we both worked in a really nice restaurant. He was a cook and I was a waitress. I was also a hot mess. My relationship with Bill was not remotely sexual. He never once told me I was beautiful or pretty and I loved that about him. We were just friends, bonded by a similar sense of humor and our own weird brand of introversion.
I needed Bill because I was more or less estranged from normal people at the time. I was dating a maniac and had lost any meaningful contact with sane people and my family. I felt alienated and hopeless. I was solving my problems with alcohol which was in fact not solving my problems, but instead creating much more complicated ones.
During this grim time, the high point of my day was dragging my ass to work and hanging out with Bill before the restaurant got busy. Every day the restaurant provided a staff meal for which it was Bill's job to concoct. At the time my diet consisted mostly of cigarettes and coffee, so the staff meal would usually be my first meal of the day. The restaurant menu consisted of fancy ass American food like Ostrich (the leanest red meat there is!) and braised haricot vert (just french green beans people). As a vegetarian and a newbie to bougie food I was completely uninterested in these types of offerings.
Because Bill and I were good buddies, to my delight and everyone else's' chagrin, the staff meal often turned out being the cheesiest, most luxurious mac and cheese in New Haven. Bill wouldn't keep me from hitting rock bottom and he never got in my business. But he was respite for me. Bill accepted me for who I was, knew I was in trouble and fed me comfort food.
He was a quirky dude too. He was a recovering alcoholic who owned a zen state of mind I didn't even bother to aspire to. His mental health was completely out of my league but he was a great example. He had a wonderful sense of humor and was friends with all the dishwashers and Mexican guys in the kitchen. He would incorporate their Spanglish phrases into his own speech. Instead of saying "why not?" the Mexican guys would say "why no"? He got a big kick out of this error so when you would ask Bill a question and the answer was yes, he would put both hands up and casually say "why no" as he calmly turned and walked away to do whatever had been asked of him. Bill's use of the phrase made me laugh and to this day I say use the phrase myself.
So, there was Bill playing guitar on the street. At first, I feared the worst, that he had gone back to drinking. He couldn't be, I stammered to myself. He was so perfect, he was so solid. As soon as I locked into his eyes I knew I hadn't lost him. They were clear and blue and he was as calm and collected as he had ever been. He told me he had gotten out of the restaurant business, because it was full of maniacs and he was working at a visiting nurse association, which suited his disposition perfectly. He was still married to the same person and during the summers his work was slow so he played guitar on the street and made o.k. money doing it. He looked great. I hadn't seen him in over 10 years and he looked like he hadn't aged. I was so happy to see him and so very happy for him to see that I had made it and was finally doing well. It felt like a happy ending for both of us and through our interaction I realized there was still hope. Hope that good can stay good and that the old scary memories could be replaced with fresh new ones. After seeing Bill I strolled the streets of New Haven with a confidence and a bounce to my step. Bill was still keeping it together and I would too. Bill's Zen-like stability was no longer an unrealistic goal for this former street urchin. We had both made it.
I love a story with a happy ending. Some of your stories are so amazing that I think they are made up. Running into an old friend playing guitar on the street on your rare trip to the city? Crazy.
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