and through murky memory
Diana's Kansas calls to me
Summer. Summer school. Summer school in somewhere other than my home town. I AM SO THERE!!!!
So I'm sitting in a comfortable lounge chair with my feet up on a coffee table. I'm dressed in my best green and gold paisley shirt, my white flannel pants with the thin light green lines in check. My polished black leather shoes agleam. The fourth floor of Jennings Dorm (I think it was Jennings. Is there a Jennings dorm at KU?) The two wings meet in a classroom setting. (We'll have an acting class there in a couple weeks and pretend we're in the end of the world. Back then we really were in the end of the world, Let's face it, our world ends each moment even as it begins again. Or as it ends again. Where is Robert Heinlein when you need someone to explain time so you'll feel smarter and still not understand?)
Out the window, Lawrence, Kansas, KU campus. Sunlight, Green fields. Going to be wheat fields. A few more buildings. Not as big as I thought it would be. (I'd later think that same thing of East Lansing. Only the University of Detroit was in a city as big as I thought it would be.) U of K. Jay hawks. (What's a Jay? A blue jay? Then they'd be blue jay hawks. I know what a Red Tail is. It's on the hawk. They hunt Jays? Jay Leno? No, they've been Jay Hawks before anyone heard of him.) It melded a town with the countryside. Hid its nuclear reactor in a hillside where I wrote poems on Sunday mornings..
A voice behind me.
"What are you doing?"
And there she stood. Five feet something or maybe nothing. Annette cut short black hair. Hand suddenly on my shoulder, Other fist on her hip. A sudden smile. A dust of freckles on a perfect, pert nose. Eyes calm. I remember that, so calm.
"Relaxing. Want to sit down?"
I pointed to the coffee table. And we were off, We jested until the meeting started and someone asked how long we'd known each other.
"Six seconds," I said.
"Forever." Diana said.
That time thing again.
We talked over breakfast when our classes coincided. I warned her: "Don't drink the coffee."
She looked nervously at me, "Why?" "Tastes awful." She threw a piece of toast at me.
We exchanged puns over glasses of iced tea on June afternoons. Puns, it is well known, don't bear repeating since they are never as hilarious the second time around. Or weren't really that hilarious at origin. She smiled once eating a powdered doughnut and I would never let the snowman forget it.
Once, she bumped into me on the way to the library.
"Carry my books?" she asked
"We could cause a stir," I mock flirted.
She cupped my chin in her hand and said, "No. We couldn't."
Right. We couldn't. I listened to her homework. She pretended to listen to mine. And never knew I knew. Our few dozen conversations, salted with jokes, laughs, always a few laughs. I was going through my deadly serious phase of teen age angst and she...we made each other laugh more than we should have. Everyone, the guy she was seeing, the girls I dated, all knew we were friends. She even liked my collection of bad poetry and she was an language major. You really have to be someone's friend to like when they're going through their Sandburg aping era. Brawny shoulders plodding on anything but cat feet. We were friends
In six weeks, we parted. As friends do, we took addresses and we said we'd write and, by golly, we did. For a little while, Then debate season hit, we wrote less. I think the last time was when we were going to college, And that was all.
Just a friendship. But, when I think of Kansas, it's Diana's Kansas. I think of a lovely, petite Italian girl, with a calm, an assurance, a certainty she would do something with her life. The soul of her natural gift and the force in her developing it. A nuclear reactor of vision and drive hidden in the beautiful landscape of woman. Modern Kansas. And, like that Kansas, she has succeeded.
I sometimes wish we could meet again, at a Starbucks under a blue Lawrence sky with our laptops or I-pads with more memory than the computers who took up whole buildings and talked in punch cards back when we were friends. And we'd have coffee, black. We'd talk of family and children and grand children and she'd tell me about her feelings about Nam and Reagan and Carter and whoever rules and wherever we are fighting at that time, in that end of the world. And I'd explain all the things that happened while I was supposed to be becoming Stephen King. And we might, most likely will, run out of words. And certainly out of time, back to the things we have to do, to our lives. And we'd stand outside and smell distant Kansas wheat and maybe exchange a brief, chaste kiss and think, as we say a new goodbye, sadly, as so many old friends, of all the might-have-been's that we know for certain never would have been. No matter the summer we conceived of them.
