Ode To My First Crush
One of my first crushes was a girl from Yonkers. We met online when I was in the 11th grade and she was in the 10th grade. Blonde, softspoken, kind of petite, good sense of humor - that was Liz. We hung out here and there, in Yonkers' open-air flea market, and at the real mall in White Plains, up until my last semester of high school. Liz and I never progressed beyond friends, we never were an item, and we lost touch after I went to college. They say you can find anyone or anything on Google, but I can prove them wrong with two words - Liz Teifer.
I'd hauled my antisocial ass down to a writer's group at my church last night, the prompt was "your first crush," and Miss Royal, the girl I handed it to (we paired off and compared writing pieces), liked the picture that I painted. Hers was a shorter poem about a fellow she'd met in grade school, and painted a nice picture as well. Miss Royal is a shoe designer who did a bit of writing in college, and wants to start writing more often again. To help with this endeavor, one of her friends gave her an ancient, rambling Royal typewriter as a gift - along with accountability. Dude, how awesome is that?!?! Built six months after the Gutenberg press, doesn't plug in, probably has the ghosts of a hundred years of writers powering it - now that's old school. And Miss Royal - easy smile, perky, fellow aspiring writer... I am so going back to writer's group next month. And will be asking about her writing.
In other news, I went and got myself locked in a damn stairwell a couple hours beforehand. I'd left the WorkforceNot center at one of the city's finer community colleges, and opted to take the stairs rather than wait for one of the crowded, slow elevators. Epic fail. Got downstairs to the first floor, turned on the knob to pull the door open, and... pow, bang, boom! Nothin'. The WorkforceNot people called security. No-show. After ten minutes of waiting for a rent-a-cop to show up, I called the real cops, Rescue 911-style. Let's just say that if there hadn't been oxygen in that stairwell, this Straphanger might've ended up on that subway in the sky. Tried the door on the second floor. Bingo. When I got down to the first floor again (the elevators were far less crowded now), I saw that the security desk was maybe 100 feet from my locked door of doom. Whatever.
Next week's entry will be written in scenic Burlington, Vermont. There will be hippies, granola, ten hours on Amtrak, and my earnest prayers for a female seatmate with a flair for conversation.