Words Like Violence

A voice from the past has recently risen through the mists of the internet and called me out, bringing with it the sounds of tumultuous teenage days made harmoniously beautiful and epic with the addition of so many years.

I've had mixed feelings about my past come calling with folks I knew in high school. I have no interest in revisiting my high school days, curiosity can't even fan the flames of interest that would tear a path to a high school reunion (number 20 coming soon). There aren't regrets or juvenile hatreds that I harbor, it all just seems like a really extended run of a not particularly enjoyable show that I would like to go ahead and put behind me, look ahead to what's coming next.

But my grade school and junior high days... that's sort of different. I know that there were large sections of junior high that made me miserable, I remember it clearly, but there's still this heartfelt feeling of love towards them. I start to think that it's because the child wonder and wholesale innocence that marched around with very thin masks of adulthood on was suddenly torn away with the move to California. So much was abruptly ended that I am constantly left wondering how the years treated those that are perpetually 13 or 14 in my mind.

Anyway, Danny found me online. Danny was without a doubt, one of the sweetest and most positive people I have ever known. He constantly made me laugh and had an impish little smile that could make you forget you were locked away in the penitentiary of junior high, a prison full of the collected hormonally challenged, a concentration of humans during their most awkward years.

Danny and I were good friends, I think mostly because there was this shared non-fear of baring our weirdness. Somewhere in the middle of those years, Danny's family moved to Sequim (a pronunciation of this town is on the applicant's test to move to Washington). Sequim was only a couple of hours away, but to a 13 year old without a car, or parents willing to drive to Sequim, it may has well have been Botswana. Not long after, Dad's career whisked us away to Orange County and my pre-fifteen life was left to gather rosy color in my memory.

Interestingly enough, I met a girl in high school who knew Danny, heard news of him through her.

Now we have tossed a couple of emails back and forth and there's talk of a reunion of sorts with a handful of people I left behind about 25 years ago. And I'm down, I'm in.

I was heading to the store yesterday, and as it's clear and hot in this part of the world at the moment, I got a glorious view of the Olympic mountains out on the other side of Puget Sound (not a bad trip to Safeway, I'm just saying). I said to myself, "it looks like a good day over on the Olympic Peninsula, I hope people are enjoying it." And then I thought, "Danny is over on the Olympic Peninsula, I'm sure he's enjoying it." And as my mind is wont to do, it started making connections. I thought of our last email conversation where I had jokingly mentioned Depeche Mode, and he had answered back saying that later that day some Depeche Mode had popped up on his iPod. I began to wonder about what music had sort of spun his head as a teenager, as a young man in his twenties.

And then I thought about chocolate chip pancakes. I can't control what happens up in my head.

I cruised around the nifty Freon smells of the air conditioned Safeway, checked out the cornucopia of salad dressing options that I had before me, when I felt this little tickling in my mind. I stopped, I imagine with my head sort of cocked to one side like a confused dog, and tried to figure out what it was, and I realized that I knew the song playing overhead.

Depeche Mode's "Enjoy The Silence".

I laughed that sort of loose laugh you get when you realize that the universe is talking right to you; I laughed because I realized I'm not quite fluent enough to understand what it's saying.