1999

Remember that? 

Where were you in 1999?  What were you doing?  Can you remember 14 years ago?  Some days, 1999 feels like a lifetime ago, sometimes it feels like it was just yesterday. Sometimes, when I think about 1999, it seems those are the most vivid memories of the last decade and a half.  Sometimes, the memories of that year seem as hazy as the rolling hills of West Sonoma County on a Spring morning.  Now that I think about it, 1999 was actually several lifetimes ago.  It is also much closer than I care to remember.   As everyone knows, I’m real introspective.  I think a lot about the past.  I think a lot about what got me here.  I think a lot about where I’m going.  I.  Think.  A lot.  I don’t necessarily think a lot about 1999, but when I do, I think about it as the beginning. 

A simpler time

In 1999, I couldn’t imagine life ever being harder than it was when I was in the middle of it.  I was 19.  I don’t know if you know this, but it’s real hard to be 19.  Unless you aren’t 19.  Then, you remember 19 as the easiest time of your life.  When, you are 19, though,  that’s the hardest it will ever get.  I was convinced of that.  I was in my second year in the Coast Guard.  I couldn’t see any farther than the time liberty was granted and the time liberty expired.  Everything that happened in between those two events only caused pain and heartache.  At work, I felt scrutinized and insignificant.  After work, I felt lonely and indignant.  I shopped a lot.  That helped.  At least I thought it did.  Until I got the bill.  I made some friends and I did things with them.  That helped.  Until I realized that I didn’t really like people.  I had sex with the guy at the grocery store I shopped at in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep.  That helped.  Until it didn’t help anymore.  So, when the orders came for school, I hopped the first redeye from Seattle to Dulles, then a morning flight from Dulles to Norfolk.  And as soon as that plane was wheels up off the Seattle runway, I looked out the window, bid farewell to the Puget Sound, and swore that everything that had happened there would ever happen to me again. 

The beginning

That was the beginning.  That late night on a United flight, as I watched the runway lights blur into a blue line, and I watched the Washington State Ferries unload their final fares, from ten thousand feet above the black, glassy surface of the sound.  That was the beginning.  At the time, I saw it as an ending.  It was supposed to be the end of the hurt.  It was supposed to be the end of debilitating vulnerability.  It was supposed to be the end of glaring weakness.

When I arrived in Yorktown on a hideously hot and humid June afternoon, I met several people.  I don’t remember all of them now.  But there were a lot of people. It was a training center (another beginning, who knew?)  I didn’t really want to be friends with any of them.  Be reminded, I don’t really like people.  It’s a social anxiety thing.  It’s easier not to like people, that way they don’t hurt you.  But there were all of these people.  And I remember sitting in a phone booth in barracks (yes, I said phone booth.  1999, remember?), and I called my mom and told her I didn’t want to be there.  That I didn’t want to do the Coast Guard thing anymore.  That I just wanted to come home.  Obviously, I couldn’t go home.  So, I went to my room, cried myself to sleep, and formed up in the morning. 

Who knew?

I could have never known on that heavy, Mid-Atlantic afternoon that it was the beginning.  I could have never known that the people I met that day would still be with me 14 years later.  I could have never understood the importance good people have on your being.  But here I am, a decade and a half later, talking about those same people, those experiences that we shared together.  We still share fire alarms and dark nights.  We still soul searching at coffee shops and ghost hunting in a black civic.  We still share fireworks at the pier on July Fourth and grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch.  We still share 1999. 

But really.  Who knew?  Who knew then, that we would ever share more than 1999?  Who knew that when we left Yorktown in the fall of that year, that 14 years later we would still be sharing our lives.  Who knew that over the years we would share divorces and deaths and births and achievements?  Babies.  Weddings.  Losses.  Victories.  Life.  Love.  We never saw that coming back then. 

Two days ago, one of these amazing people became a father for the first time.  In Kodiak.  Where, nearly six years go, my own child was born., within two days of one of these other people.    A town where I was reunited with one of these people, six years b before that.   Even though it may seem so, Kodiak is not our connection.  We’ve been all over the place.  I remember , a few nights in Alameda, playing Uno and drinking daiquiris with all of those same people, at the same time.  It’s not Alameda, either, though.  It’s coffee in Norfolk.  It’s lunch in Seattle.  It’s wine on the Sonoma Coast.  Location isn’t our connection.  We are the connection.  The human connection. 

The years pass, we do different things.  We all move forward, but we never move past our friendship.  So, who knew?  Who knew that 1999 would be the year that united us for the rest of our lives?  Who knew that wherever we ended up, we would always be together?