1997

I found this photo while I was back in Delaware going through a big crate of film and random terrible pictures. This is the first friend I made at the University of Delaware. I have a very strange sense of memory of this time period in which I remember really mundane details and yet other more vivid experiences meld together with a haziness of late morning dreams and memories rehashed and recited and pitched together into a cloudy intangibility. I say this because I remember I first saw Sally on my second or third day at UD in Anthropology class, and when I finally talked to her it was in the library on the third floor. We were studying for some Anthropology test or quiz, separately. She was wearing a Batman T-shirt, I remember that very clearly. I got an A on the test.

A year later I dislocated my ankle skateboarding and was hobbling around on crutches for most of the summer and I went to go visit her in Smyrna or someplace just south of there. Here's where my memory becomes unreliable. I remember walking around some redneck town where she's from: a girl with a mohawk and a China-man on crutches. We went to go eat pizza. We went to the video store to rent "Better Off Dead." We went to this empty, dilapidated pier to sit by the river. This part I remember so vividly that I have to be making this up: I remember there was a breeze at our backs so there weren't any bugs. Across the water I could see the river widening and opening into the ocean, and above that the sun was setting in a deep, humming orange behind these huge ominous dark clouds and lightning was flashing intermittently making them glow and appear to creep across the horizon. See? It was so hauntingly beautiful there's no way I could remember all of that, but that's the memory I have most about that day. That and riding shotgun in Sally's pickup truck listening to Action Patrol. And her high school graduation picture in which she looked like such a normal, nice girl in a white summer dress.

Not that she was anything but nice. She was pretty awesome, highly intelligent, and very sweet to talk with. I'm pretty sure I had the hots for her at one point, but then I saw all these dead animals she kept in her freezer. We were friends until she graduated from UD and I don't think I've seen her since. I probably took this photo with either a really old Nikkormat with a 50mm, 1.4f lens or this Canon Elan IIe I bought a couple months before I went to California then sold shortly after I got back to buy a Nikon N90s. Yeah, blah blah blah. It must have been on the lawn near the Pencader dorms.