Finding Good in the Lost and Found

When revisiting the past, it seems the elapsed differences do not whisper subtlety like the sameness does.

"That's the swing where Tara and I sat every night after dinner, eating frozen yogurt and watching boys play...the frisbee that's like football. Ultimate frisbee," I pointed for The Boy. The sameness: the swing is still exactly where it was seven years ago when my frizzy hair and skinny legs met Tara's blue dress and husky voice. The differences: I forgot what the game was called that we were "watching" back then; my hair's not so frizzy, and my legs, at least by my standards, would no longer be classified as skinny. Tara still has the husky voice but not, I suspect, the same blue dress.

To reach the swing, I had to pass a difference. "There used to be a bench there where Mike sat to read Rick Reilly's column every Tuesday afternoon when his Sports Illustrated arrived. When I walked by he would say, 'C. Don't go to work,'" I chuckled to The Boy, "and half the time I wouldn't." The Boy smiled at this story, as he had long ago adopted the phrase from stories I'd told. He says it to me often from his pillow, next to mine, with a fake Southern accent, and especially on Mondays.

Of course, these are minor. There are differences that scream, and there are those that don't have to. Starting six years ago on those grounds, I began a process of pining and losing, growing and finding. I have to believe, and I believe I do, that I found much more than I lost there. Saturday I sat in the new football stadium beside Amber, one of the heartbreakingly loyal and fiercely loving friends I had found, lamenting the things we had lost. The Boy watched football on my other side, and I looped my arm through his, basking in how ordinary the moment seemed; how unlikely and beautiful it actually was.

Years earlier in that town I lost years on a Lost Boy who made me, inadvertently, lose myself. But I found myself again soon after and with a vengeance.

I looked at The Boy who followed me to that same one-stoplight town just to see the setting of so many stories. The Boy I, logically, never should have met, let alone married. The unlikely Boy who had become my favorite person and biggest love. We bought coffee at Broad River. We walked through the quad, and somehow it all made him think about what he had lost, or rather, never had the chance to have.

"This just looks like a college, you know?" he said, echoing my seven-year-old sentiment. He said it made him long for an experience he had long ago decided against. He had worked long hours before and after classes he commuted to. He never had a dorm or a roommate or a swing on the quad. I mirrored his wistfulness, realizing that experience had teamed with other hard ones to bring him to me, in his current state. But it still made me sad.

The things I found cannot be separated from the people I found, and differences in them are just as apparent. I met Amber in our first class on the first day of school. We had been paired together to interview each other. She was wearing a sweater even though it was August, and she admitted she had dressed as the mascot at her high school. I knew we would be friends. This weekend I hugged her and her two-year-old and helped bathe her two-month-old. The Boy, though he would not go near him at first, held the baby to his heart before we left.

"So, do you think we can have one of these?" I whispered.

"Not soon or anything," he prefaced, "but definitely."

Edie, on the other hand, had initially descended on my life whether I liked it or not. And at first, I had not. We had been assigned to each other as roommates; I tried to switch rooms before I had even met her. The night before orientation, our unassuming RA interrupted my new roommate's shower to announce my presence. Edie met me, my siblings and both of my parents while wearing a bath robe and a towel turban. She thought I was weird because I hung a poster of a barechested Brady Anderson in close proximity to a photograph of Mother Teresa. I thought she could eat me for breakfast. We remained roommates for the better part of six years. In my wedding program, though I had known her as long as the others who were labeled, "College Friends," she was marked, "College Roommate." And only she understood the distinction. We talked this weekend about her relocation, adjustments and plans, and a gay hairdresser who had become a real friend.

On the way home Sunday, we stopped in Greensboro so I could see my boys. Or rather, the men who used to be my boys. They were joined respectively by Mike's wife, whom we all met in college, and Tripp's new girlfriend-- and I had a hunch she wouldn't be going anywhere for a while. Sameness and differences. I introduced them to The Boy, who loved them as I knew he would. "If for some reason they were ever local," he said later, "I feel like we'd be boys." I was thrilled he felt the way I figured he would; my love of these people justified, despite its defiance of the time/space continuum. When we ordered lunch, Tripp, ever the token thinker and philosopher, ordered his sandwich with green peppers, but not red. The waitress soon returned and informed him that, though she thought it was stupid, he could not order only one kind of pepper. "It's all or nothing," she shrugged.

And this may have been one of the bigger differences I saw. He did not appear to contemplate; he said, "All." Though I may have fabricated the metaphor, I smiled at the pretty blonde beside him, at the irony of progress abundant all weekend, and at the relief that not everything good goes away.