Souvenirs from younger years

When people leave your life, of course they don't leave completely. You may want them to take every last hair with them (especially if you're Sus and stray hairs gross you out), but they don't. They leave little reminders, like a red eyelash, the toilet seat left up, a song they inexplicably memorized and performed complete with heartfelt air guitar.

Other people change you, too. Besides adding to the library of memories, people in my life have made me more careful and thoughtful about things I hadn't noticed before, or habits I hadn't known were habits.

Knowing Shane, for instance, has left me with a heightened awareness of skin. His would turn a scary color when he was sick - actually very yellow and dark. He would joke that it was the black woman's heart leaking afro-juice into his system. Of course, before Shane I could recognize someone who was sick, but never so many shades of sick. The talent was, say, unhoned.

And Paul, the guy I almost dated at the YMCA camp, the vegetarian who played jazz guitar and promised to drop everything and go on tour if I only asked... (Why haven't I? He's full of it.) One day at camp, a nine-year-old girl unthinkingly squished an ant in his music classroom. He... well, he NEARLY flipped. He gave the girl a very serious look and said, "That ant had life. You took it away. Why?" Of course the girl didn't have an answer. What a weird uber-hippie thing to say, right? And yet I don't kill bugs since knowing him.

And Stefan had this nearly creepy love of dogs. Well, to be fair, he loved and reacted to dogs the way I love and react to children. But kids are cute... dogs smell. Okay, kids smell sometimes, too. Anyway, he and I didn't argue over it. I just began to notice dogs more, and then one day I actually found myself kneeling by a beagle puppy making affectionate, incoherent noises, and I realized I'd been converted.

Each person I've met has left something like this, unveiled something seemingly miniscule about this life. My life is mostly made of the miniscule, I think. Maybe that's why I can't tell a story in any straightforward manner. Every story is just a haphazard linking of minutia, which, once ordered, become somehow dramatic.

Anyway, before I got on that tangent, I wonder what I leave with other people? Do I change people? Is it the same thing with everyone? Are there, say, three major leavings I happen to sow among my friends like wild oats? Maybe that's why I'm always trying to share the minutia of my life, hoping some of it will catch hold and I'll travel on with people to regions unknown.

And why is THAT a good thing? Rather imperialist of me, isn't it?

O, fie on thee, education in literature! Thou hast a ruined maiden made.