I wake up. I go to the bathroom next to my bedroom and take a fourteen minute shower, dress in the outfit I had chosen a week before, go upstairs and drink a glass of grapefruit juice. I speak with my parents about my day’s activities and go to Eddie’s restaurant with my father for breakfast. After visiting two banks and making other necessary errands, we return home and do chores.
Sounds like a typical Saturday morning for me. However, after finishing whatever chores I have, I drive the Subaru into the garage and bring out the vacuum cleaner. I vacuum the dashboard, take out all of the floor mats and beat them with a stick, vacuum the carpet, even the back seat.
Finished with the car, leaving it cleaner than it was when we bought it, I return to the bathroom and blanket myself in cologne and pose in the mirror. I sit down on the stairs and tie the laces of my pure white Converse Chuck Taylor All-Star High-Top “date shoes,” bid my parents farewell, start the newly cleaned car, and head north.
After forty-two minutes of driving I reach Elmira South Side and wait in the parking lot of the Pizza Hut where I was to meet my blind date, a date set up by one of my best friends and his girlfriend. I wait. And wait. And wait. After about forty-nine minutes of waiting (I had gotten there perhaps eighteen minutes early), I was a little nervous and decided to call my friend. He’s at the mall with his counterpart, and I tell him I would hopefully meet up with them as soon as my date arrived. After sixty-four minutes I call my date’s cell phone about six times, each time my phone telling me that there was a problem in connection. Frantically I re-call my friend, demanding answers from his girlfriend, the only human connection I have to my date. The only solace given is that her (my date’s) cell phone provider is an obscure company, and that’s probably why the connection issue exists.
After 117 minutes I decide to return home, finally realizing and accepting that I had been stood up. While driving home I wonder why I hadn’t checked inside the Pizza Hut; perhaps she had been waiting for me for 118 minutes in the restaurant. I don’t turn back, what’s done is done. All I can do is continue on with my life. That’s really all anyone can do.
I haven’t talked with Michaelyn since the night before the non-occurring date. I don’t really care to chase butterflies. Perhaps it’s better that it turned out this way; I certainly learned some very valuable life-lessons. I picked myself up after falling off of my metaphorical bicycle, and while I haven’t quite mastered two-wheeling, I’m well on my way.
