"Freshly Squeezed" brings back a memory of the kickoff to my second bachelorhood. Not a good memory or a bad memory but a "scratch your head" memory.
Entering second bachelorhood is a moment of re-orientation, so I suppose it varies considerably, depending on your first bachelorhood and what you learned in the interim, as well as where those lessons left you, which is almost always a variation on a familiar script:
ILSA
Please don't. Don't, Rick. I can
understand how you feel.
RICK
Huh! You understand how I feel. How
long was it we had, honey?
ILSA
I didn't count the days.
RICK
Well, I did. Every one of them. Mostly
I remember the last one. A wow finish.
A guy standing on a station platform
in the rain with a comical look on
his face, because his insides had
been kicked out.
The variable is where you want to go from there, and, while moving to Morocco and opening a bar wouldn't be a bad next move, getting drunk and insulting your former main squeeze definitely is, though, as next moves go, it's far more common.
In my case, my next move eventually involved a fair amount of alcohol, but only as part of a show that began with Gummis.
My first bachelorhood ended when I was just 21, which has always left me a little unsympathetic towards the familiar-but-oddly-one-sided complaint about having gone from being someone's daughter to being someone's wife, but which did allow me to emerge 12 years later with a fair amount of experience and yet -- things having ended with more of a whimper than a bang -- still in pretty saleable condition.
At the time, I was in Colorado Springs, freelancing for a Denver-based real estate magazine, and it happened that, a very few months after the split, the Colorado Association of Realtors had their annual convention in the Springs.
I was pressed into service to sit the vendor booth, together with the sales rep, a strikingly handsome twenty-something Sam-Malone-style bachelor and our boss, who was doing more circulating on the floor than booth-sitting, but did relieve us so we could go get some lunch and some Hawaiian shirts.
The big hoo-hah that night was Hawaiian themed. I don't know why, though I imagine a pair of airline tickets probably came into it somewhere. I didn't end up with them.
But Mark, the salesman, was determined that it was time for me to get back on the horse, so, when we went to a grocery store to pick up a couple of sandwiches, we also loaded up on Gummis of various kinds.
It was 1984 and Gummis were a fairly recent phenomenon, still pretty limited to little kids.
We didn't want them for ourselves, but because a few booths away a hotel had a booth set up to sell Realtors on the idea of parking their relocated executives in suites while they found permanent housing.
It was staffed by five exceptionally cute young single women, and, if you've sat a convention booth, you know there are long periods when the conventioneers are in break-out sessions and the vendors are largely left on their own.
During one of these idle moments, Mark took the Gummi assortment over there and wasn't he just the sweetest thing?
So that evening, we went to the Hawaiian-themed event in our new Hawaiian shirts with our new Gummi-lured hotties, and I found myself at a table for eight with Mark, five very attractive girls from the hotel booth and a classified sales rep from the Rocky Mountain News who was, as the evening wore on, increasingly sorry she had taken the vacant chair.
And the evening did indeed wear on, or at least it wore on me, and I began to remember all the reasons I had been really, really glad not to be single anymore. We were having a lot of fun, laughing and dancing and toasting each other and I couldn't wait for it to be over.
By the end, I had pushed back in my chair and was talking to the woman from the Rocky, who was also in her mid-30s and not only had more to say for herself to begin with, but had also been divorced longer than I had.
Which brings to mind both the Indiana Jones quote, "It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage," and the Woodstock motto, "Every patient becomes a doctor." It was only small talk and it wasn't headed anywhere, but it was therapeutic small talk and moreso because it wasn't headed anywhere.
Once you are a grown-up, you want to be around someone who has amassed a little bit of mileage, at least enough to know that Gummi Bears aren't just translucent. They are transparent.
And I suppose they knew that. It's not like they appeared to be looking for more than what was happening.
Don't know, don't care, just glad to have passed through that portion of the journey so quickly and with nothing to show for it but a very odd memory.
And, hey, it could have been worse. Scylla and Charybdis, baby, Scylla and Charybdis.
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