THE MIDDLE PLACE

I was 18 and just about to successfully complete my freshman year in college in Decorah, IA - which was amazing because I don’t remember attending classes. What I do remember was seeing my first naked man, who happened to be running across campus to deliver his senior paper to Main Hall before the 5pm deadline, when I stumbled into a career fair. It was thus that I walked into a room with men on the brain and left with a job. Not just any job though, this was a job working at a Christian Summer Camp driving draft horses around in a hay-cart. I found out later that they used horse-drawn carts in favor of cars to deliver daily meals because this was a more tried and true method of scaring the be-jeezus into or out of the little campers by showing them what their lives might be like if they were unlucky enough to be born Amish.

I must have been drunk - although I didn’t drink - or high - although I’d never actually accomplished this - on something because how I could manage to walk into a room with the sole intention of seeking out strapping young men and walk out of it 15 minutes later with a job involving waaay too much leather and draft animals was beyond my young mind. I took the job not because it was situated in a tiny western-Wisconsin town of less than 300 people and no gas station, not because I didn’t have the first idea how to drive draft horses let alone muck out stalls, and definitely not because it was a Christian Summer Camp of the type that would most likely involve boring in-depth Bible-Studies and sickeningly sweet sing-alongs; I took it because I was dizzy with the idea that I could, for the first time in my life, get a job out of my home state and work that job alone.

The freedom of choice and the freedom to get on the road and try it all out alone with no help from friends or family excited me to my core. The fear and doubt came later, but that moment was filled with possibility. I knew I could learn the job quickly, I was never afraid of working hard especially when animals were involved, and the alternative was returning to the summer I had always known. Previous summers had drifted sleepily by merely existing as stretches of time in my mind. They were comfortably ensconced in the boring safety of the Minneapolis suburbs with its unassuming and unwritten rules softly bumping into my choices, nudging them down the center of the road towards home.

After a couple of weeks visiting my parents in Eden Prairie, MN, I packed my belongings on a bright Saturday morning, piled them into the rusty white ’86 Oldsmobile Celebrity I had inherited from my older sister, and headed towards the border of Wisconsin. I rolled down all four of the windows and turned up the radio to compete with the roaring wind. It was a clear, warm day and the roads were long and sparsely populated with the couples visiting relatives for the weekend or Long-Haul truckers part way through their route between factories. The city made way for prairie and prairie made way for modest river bluffs too green to be foreboding but practically grandiose after hours of flat land dotted by run-down farm houses.

Somewhere between the border of Minnesota and La Crosse, WI, I broke down. This was not the auspicious beginning to my independent summer had hoped for. I cannot exactly remember what town I broke down in, but the only buildings there were situated right on the road and the land in that particular stretch of land was flat enough to see that there was nothing beyond them but solemn crop fields. I parked and sat in my car leaning against the plush navy seats feeling the heat seep in through the open windows and letting the buzz of insects settle into my wind-blown ears. I didn’t feel disappointment, but a bit desperate. I had only made it about a hundred and twenty five miles or so away from home and I needed help already. I made my way to the local mechanic to make a call home and another to the camp. As I sat for a couple of hours in the small lobby of the building I pushed around some old magazines and wished I had a bag full of new clothes instead of the same ones I knew so well. The mechanic finally informed me that essentially my car had decided that this small town was as far as it wanted to stray from home for a while. I started to feel it may have had willfully betrayed me and my bid for freedom, just one last nudge towards home that I had to shake off. When a beaten-up mini van from the camp finally arrived, I took my bags from its trunks and shrugged off the last shell of my former life.

I felt queasy and anxious to see my new summer home. I knew I was arriving to work, but I still felt like I could easily be a child heading off to camp for the first time. I wanted to meet my fellow campers and stay up late with them talking about what we knew about ourselves and how far we’d gone with boys; but now the day was fading, the towns were getting smaller, the granola bar I had greedily eaten at 2:30pm was a faded memory in my stomach, and I began to feel the desolation of my rash decision. When we finally arrived, the sun had set behind the rolling hills of the Mississippi River banks and the young staff was gathered at a picnic table outside of the large, main building we pulled up to. It seemed they were waiting for us to return and they all greeted me with genuine but swift politeness before heading into the building for a taco salad dinner.

I ate mostly in silence so I could take in their eager conversation. My ears hummed with the information of these strangers: who knew whom and for how long, who was new and where they had come from, and what their various roles were to be. Aileen and her husband had come from Las Vegas. He was a PhD student in Theological Philosophy and she was a retired show-girl. She poured on about how they met in the early 90’s when she was still dancing and he still had hair and how now she was job-less and living off his small fellowship stipend. She was positively thrilled to be here to help run the camp’s craft barn, but it was clear that her husband was not. Aileen offered us all smiles with her simple face as she excused herself for being a bit overweight for a dancer and offered up the story of the moment when she first wore the large head-dress of a real Las Vegas show girl. She laughed shyly as she rose to wipe her teary eyes in the peace of the dingy restroom while her husband sat stonily by and seemed to physically punish the stale taco salad for the transgression of marrying a wife too simple to argue the finer points of doctrine with.

Laurie and Adam had met two years ago as camp counselors and were now engaged. They spoke of their relish for nurturing young children in the faith each summer and spoke with bubbling excitement about tying the knot later in the summer in the very field we were now sitting above. They were so young and happy, but as seniors in college, they seemed ancient and knowledgeable to my eyes and I began to think that a Christian summer camp might be the very place to find a nice humble boyfriend to share the long summer with.

Eric was a blue-eyed, fair-haired counselor of 4 years and was junior in college from South Dakota - although he didn’t know what he was majoring in yet. He good-naturedly confessed that he might not graduate and would rather stay a camp counselor as long as he could. Eric offered to bring his guitar out later and go over some of the camp songs with everyone and I thought that I might be able to see myself kissing his kind face despite his slightly jiggly tummy and bad breath.

When the lens of their inquiry swung its way toward me, I owned up that I had never worked at a Christian camp before and hadn’t much in the way of horse skills for that matter, but I smiled as pleasantly as possible and encouraged someone else to speak. I waylaid Eric after dinner broke up and we chatted lightly for an hour about what camp was like when it was flooded with children and about my hometown back in Minnesota. After two days of casual chats like this, Eric and I were joined at the hip and I was in love with the adventure of my summer.

The sweetness of this young infatuation plus the terrifying new responsibility of caring for a barn full of horses made me vibrate with energy and nerves through every waking hour until I collapsed exhausted onto my bunk bed each night. Simple facts such as how I would have to set my alarm for 5:30am each morning, round up the horses, get them fed, tack up the draft horses, load up breakfast for delivery and keep the draft horses away from the lamas they found so terrifying - all without an older adults supervising my every move - thrilled and frightened me to the bone. I would watch the clock nervously from the minute I woke and practically ran out to the barn to fetch my assigned round-up horse Rocky, worrying all the time that this morning I wouldn’t be able to find the horses in the field or that my draft horses would pick today to refuse to come in to the coral and force me to show up to the kitchen on foot to the staff know how I had failed to get the cart hooked up in time to deliver breakfast to the campers at the end of the long valley. The freshness of my responsibility and the rawness of my nerves made it seem that every task and every moment was an important matter. The moments were made of hot, glowing fire, each one having to be handled with full attention and I was their unwitting handler, unable to put them down long enough to back away and see that they were small, manageable tasks and it really didn’t matter 15 minutes one way or another when I delivered breakfast, or even if I delivered breakfast at all. The campers would survive and so would I. But for the time being, I went on with importance and the tight electricity of fear clashing about in my breast and loving every minute of it.

My favorite moment of each morning was settling the draft horses into their stall and lifting the heavy harnesses onto their backs. The leather was old, heavy and smelled of real work and the feel of it against my flesh gave me a rough strength. I walked with a wider stride, sat back into my hip when standing, and looked about the valley with a long and steady gaze after handling the harnesses. My overalls started to reek of the leather and horse-sweat even after washing. During the long, hot days in the barn, when it was time for mid-day break, I did not return with the others to the cool main building above the field where we slept and they conversed. I remained alone in the barn to sleep on the back of the fatter of the two draft horses, taking in his scent and the dust of the barn while I was lulled to sleep by the beat of the taller draft horse’s feet stamping heavily against the abuses of pestering flies. When I wasn’t tired, I imagined our small herd of twelve donated trail horses were Mustangs straight from the ranges of Montana and that I was breaking them in to be as gentle as lambs; I imagined my mixed breed draft horses were a matched set of Belgians as nimble as circus ponies; and I imagined driving into town on the weekends and passing an older man in a store who would think “Now there’s a hard worker. I bet she knows how to handle herself around a barn”. I had found a direction and a passion with no help from my parents, with no recommendation from a friend, and I alone had picked up the reigns and made my way into the territory that would make a woman out of me.

I had shed the comfort of home and did not look back for assistance. After college, I might hop into my car and take off to the Southwest to work my way through the ranches with only a postcard’s glance toward home. I had always felt I was held at arms-length from my friends, never taking them fully into my heart or being taken into theirs and this only firmed my newly formed resolve to keep moving, to fashion my life out of change and solitude. Horses, land and the road were good companions for this. They took you places, accompanied you and accepted you all without judgment or asking more than their due. Best of all, their conversation was full of questions that did not have a wrong answer, “Where to now? Would you like to stay for a while?” and statements that hung from every corner and branch waiting for you to pull them towards you or let them hang, “Lovely evening. That field is especially flat. Azure: let’s see what shade it is today.” It was with this new spark in my heart and raw excitement in my limbs that I set myself apart from the humanity that had filled my life in the past 18 years - so anxious to rid myself of what was smothering me with memories of awkward youth.

On a Monday morning not long into the summer, I hoisted the heavy harnesses onto my draft horses, hooked up the half dozen odd straps and lead them plodding out to the hitching post by the hay-cart. It was bright and slightly crisp that morning and too early for any other staff members to be awake, but I was already hot and sweaty from my excited exertion and had been moving quickly all morning with anticipation of getting to the load-up site a full ten minutes early. I was thinking with pride of how little time I had needed to learn how to hook up my horses to the cart as I finished untwisting some lines between the two powerful beasts. They stared sleepily at the post, stamped their heavy hoofs into the soft ground and snorted cloudy puffs of warm breath into the chilly air as I unhooked their lead ropes from the post and drew the hard leather reigns up to my driving seat at the front of the large hay-cart.

Once I climbed aboard, I looked down upon my horses and noticed the crisscrossing of the lines between them looked off. Had I attached them wrong? “Uh” I exclaimed with a little exhalation of impatience. I certainly had attached them in the wrong place. “No problem”, I thought, “I’ll just jump down and fix them; this is why I have eyes, to check my mistakes”. But time was not on my side. The camp’s two lamas, that the draft horses were so wildly afraid of, had gotten loose some time in the night and were now wandering around the coral and what was worse, my draft horses had seen them the very moment I was jumping down from the cart. Piercing cries immediately ripped from their throats. They threw their heads and began thrashing violently about and the clatter of the heavy hay-cart behind them only frightened them more as they worked against each other to get as far away from the lamas as quickly as possible. I leapt back onto the cart to instinctively grab the reigns as it was speeding away, but as I did so the realization of the useless reigns and the gathering speed of the cart slammed into my frenzied brain. “Oh! How could I have let this happen?” I screamed in my brain as I shouted commands to “Whoa” at the charging horses.

Pull as I might I knew that there was no controlling this runaway team and time seemed to slow even as we careened through the gates of the coral and into the field below the main building. I wanted so much to regain control, to steer them away from harm, and I knew that even if I wanted to, jumping off the high cart at that speed was no longer an option. We were alone, my horses and I, flying across the lonely yard towards the unknown. I had plenty of time to see how the long leather lines were miss-hooked so that the horses would not feel each other’s movements and my pulling put pressure on one side of their bits but not the other, but I continued to pull and shout commands at them in a low, loud voice as I frantically wondered whether they’d regain composure before reaching the road or whether they’d take me tumbling into a ditch. I could feel my shame for thinking I was ready for this independence and the anguish of my own self-destruction bathe me with a cold sweat; but mostly I felt stupid for still holding onto the reigns and for thinking that they were ever of real use.

The last thing I knew, as I gripped the reigns still hoping that my fervent wishing might make them suddenly direct the horses calmly back to the barn, was that the taller horse was veering to the left of a wide oak tree towards the open field and the fatter horse was turning to the right of the tree towards the direction of the main building that housed a sleeping staff and all the comforts therein; but I - I was staring at the middle place and its dried, graying bark rushing towards me with all the intent and purpose it could muster.

FULL WORTH

She was a small woman. Her hands were child-like. Even though Karen had reached the age of thirty, she was easily mistaken for an adolescent from a small distance. When she drove her white sedan, she would hang her arm out the window to make herself feel larger, more non-chalant, more “devil-may-care”, but from the man in the car behind her might just as easily think that someone’s child had taken the family car for a joyride.

Her hands were always moving swiftly, easily tucking her straight nut-brown hair behind an ear, carelessly brushing some imaginary pest aside, and that is what Kevin liked about her; those tiny hands working tirelessly away at his imagination. He was fascinated by those hummingbird movements and how the little jewels of fingernails might feel on his skin if she might accidentally touch him. She was so small. He imagined he could fold her right into his body and easily carry her around inside of his coat all day long if she would let him. Kevin liked to drink his coffee at the stand where she worked instead of rushing off to work just so he could watch her while pretending to stare out the window at the people bustling by. His whole morning routine changed once he found Karen. Before he even knew her name, Kevin began pressing his shirts in the evening and stopped buying ground coffee at the store so he could spend fifteen minutes each morning drinking coffee by Karen and her fluttering hands.

Karen made it a point to smile more than she spoke. She learned long ago that she was rarely heard. It made her so angry that even when people knew her age, knew how intelligent and sparkling her conversation could be, that they still assumed she was child-like. Their patronizing affirmations and the way they steered the conversation back into lighter subjects infuriated her until she stopped trying. She would sit politely by while they unconsciously took up a conversation on health-care or foreign policy with the statuesque woman nearby and easily included a man wearing a ripped t-shirt. “Was it their size? Is it my voice?” She would later chastise herself for not holding their attention, for not being more confident, but it was easier not to begin in the first place. She held a confused anger inside herself, anger for being dismissed so easily and for somehow letting it happen over and over again.

The cigarettes she had smoked since she was fifteen only made her light voice a bit raspy but no lower and had nearly destroyed the laugh she used to covet. So light and careless, her girlfriends used to tell her how much they loved it when she laughed, but she thought a lower voice would be a fair exchange for something she used less and less. But Karen dismissed this as soon as she thought of it. Banished the thought as useless and returned to the coffee counter to relieve Terry of register duty.

Kevin’s job wasn’t demanding, but that might have been the problem. A demanding job might have taken a specialist, and Kevin was just an anybody. He knew that if he failed to show up to work, they could replace him within two weeks, their only worry being "Would the next anybody play a radio in their cubicle or cook smelly food in the microwave". It kept him consistent, and consistency was what kept his feet on the ground, his butt in his office chair, and a respectable distance between himself and everyone else.

It was the safety he felt within time and boundaries that made him fall in love with poetry. He felt like he had been made for poetry; short or long lyrical lines of distilled meaning opened a little door in the back of Kevin's mind. He loved to read the lines of a poem over and over again imagining himself inside of it. Kevin would fly along the lines, suspended by their images; at one moment he was the speaker, then he became the object as quickly as that, he was the writer laying the words down on the page. He relished flying the poem from country side to country side relocating the people and places to new hills, valleys and cities where new people with different accents would take over the narration and plunge the scene into new shades of color.

Karen was his own poem. He watched her lines unfold, savored each moment and drew the words from the curves of her cheek. Something about the way she could slip in and out of his frame of vision was captivating. Half of her face might be visible around the great metal edge of the espresso machine and then it would be gone and for the next five minutes only an elbow would sneak around the edge in a flash of pale skin. These pieces of Karen dipping in and out of view could make his heart swell and tears come to his eyes unless he took a deep breath of the artificially chilled air and trained his eyes back down at his coffee cup. He had drunk his fill for the day and the clock told him he had ten minutes to find his way to his desk two blocks away.

Her days were a waiting game and she knew it. Karen was waiting to be noticed even if it was futile. She was upset by how easy it was for people to dismiss her presence and how she so easily let it happen. She knew she should be working in a real job in marketing, what she studied in school, but she hadn’t put a new resume out into the world in two weeks. Just one more way she let the world roll over her. Her weekly phone calls to her mother were always the same, encouragement to keep searching, keep filling out applications and the lecture about setting up face-to-face meetings with managers. This was easier said than done, and Karen knew how hard she would have to work to make them take her seriously. Thinking about it made her feel tired and heavy inside and it was just as easy to stop thinking about it and give it another week when her anger at herself might urge her into action. For now, she would just keep on showing up to the coffee stand and wait for another day to be measured at her full worth.

POO BROUGHT US TOGETHER

My husband, bless his heart, is a cultured human. He is an anthropologist, an environmentalist, a supporter of humanitarian causes, and despite all of that, he perseveres in his belief that anything remotely connected to the subject of “poo” is the gold standard of comedy.

He is actually a very sensitive man, being raised along-side three sisters in a very stable, middle class, Midwestern family in the small town of Mayville, Wisconsin, and he is actually somewhat of a renaissance man. Saul played football, basketball, and ran track in high school; he camps, hikes, and fishes; he reads fiction and non-fiction from a wide variety of authors; he appreciates all forms of music and will attend all manner of concerts from heavy-metal to classical; he loves realism to abstract art and adores strange and obscure movies; he has a masters degree, works in a museum, loves beer, small towns and the land just as much as wine, cities and new technological innovations.

This being said, poo brought my husband and I together. I don’t know what this says about me, but one thing is for sure… I married him.

We had a demure courtship. Not by my choice. I would’ve been all over him like a groupie on an aging rock-star, but somehow he felt he wanted to take things slow in order to “get to know me”. Now, in earlier times, I might have felt this tactic was reserved for men who were using me as a cover for their gay life-style or had a festering sexually transmitted disease to hide and unleash upon me once my feelings had been secured. Not Saul. What he had in his closet was much stinkier. I would only find out about after 3 months of furtive glances, tension-heavy non-touching-talk-sessions in the driveway, and two-four public meetings where he would buy me a couple of drinks with his hard-earned minimum wage, always sitting a respectable distance away while I consumed them. I think I touched his arm a couple of times, but after receiving no positive response, I resorted to desperate measures. I complained to his friends.

Now Saul and I hadn’t known each other before we started dating. I was a single girl in Milwaukee and my Minneapolitan self couldn’t figure out where the decent men in this city were hiding themselves. It was so much easier in Minneapolis. Minneapolis, that small but unassumingly glittering city replete with theaters, jazz clubs, museums and dance performances; all things that a girl can use as a safe excuse to meet men on a Friday night. After all, if the dude looks or smells funny, you can always just turn your head back to the obscure performance piece and ignore away. In Milwaukee, I was devoid of options. Young people did not frequent artistic events in Milwaukee and I had not yet discovered that Milwaukee was, in fact, otherwise known as “Brew-City” and therefore any self-respecting young-in of proper age was, and will always be, frequenting any number of the city’s many breweries and their tours. I was at the mercy of my co-workers.

I was in town for a total of 6 months and had a few self-inflicted and unsuccessful runs-ins with a Hippie, a Rock-Star-Former-Heroine-Addict, and a Stalker-ish Architecture Student. It was time for a real date, this time not set up by myself at the bar. But, as a newcomer and a Minnesotan, I was not well equipped to meet people. All the education a Minnesotan gets in this realm is “stick to the people you know”. Well that’s as helpful as cat stuck in your pants when your circle of acquaintance happen to be unavailable or have proven themselves to be hopelessly toxic in relationships - let alone their questionable “bed-side manner”. Besides this, I was hampered by the fact that I was an artist situated waaaaaaay left of the acceptable rock-musician-type and my new acquaintances did not know what to do with me. To be fair, these were servers at the restaurant I worked for and these generally consist of simple folk. To be unfair, we worked the small café at Milwaukee’s Art Museum and all the servers and bartenders were musicians, poets, and artists. So they should’ve known better.

“You’re a dancer? Like, exotic?” they’d say.

“No”, I’d reply for the hundredth time, “Modern Dancer”.

“Like Hip Hop?”

“No, like Contemporary Dance… On a stage… All artsy and crap like that.”

“Huh” was the only blank-stare, mouth-breathing answer I could ever expect.

Which didn’t really matter anyhow because they had ceased to care about three and a half sentences back.

I once made the mistake of performing for an art opening at the museum we all worked for and the café was catering. Thank the good lord I quit shortly thereafter, because no one wanted to ask me what the piece meant, why the dancers were rolling on the floor covered in black mossy material and why I was wearing pants on my arms. This coupled with the fact that I had the habit of fashioning my hair into little sculptures often featuring little nests made of hair with life-size birds, feathers and eggs stuck in (believe me, the old ladies who frequented our café loved it, but the poets thought I’d lost it) and I had a quite a task convincing this dubious crowd to find an appropriate date for me. They were the sort that drank until 5 am and stumbled into work at 8am; they were the crowd that slept around and bragged about it; they were the bunch that frequented poetry readings, underground rock concerts and wore vintage clothes they deconstructed and re-constructed into hats and leggings; but I, who danced in the Modern way and dared to eschew their company and venture out to bars alone, was the one who was “weird”.

One Friday evening as we were closing up after a catering event and I was faced with either another evening alone or a mind-numbing string of bar hopping I verbally exploded at my co-workers, “One of you… one of you must know someone hot that I can hook up with!” It went something like that anyway. And miracle of miracles, a server piped up. “Ross has a roommate, Saul. I’ve seen him and he’s pretty cute.”

I turned on Ross, advancing with dangerous speed, “Ross, this roommate of yours, is he cute?” Yes, I know, what a stupid question for a hetero-boy to be faced with, but I was desperate for information.

“Um, yeah, I guess so.”

“Does he have a college degree?”

“Um, I think he’s finishing his Masters.”

“Really? In what?”

“Uh, I think its Anthropology.”

“Okay… does he like the arts?”

“Uh, I guess so.”

“Does he like nature? You know, hiking and camping.” At which point Ross got a little more confidence.

“Yes.”

“Is he tall? I like guys who are 6 feet at least” At which point Ross lost all of his confidence again.

“Um, I think he’s my height, like at least 5’10.”

“Well, that will do. When can I meet him?” At which point Ross totally got nervous and only gave in once I badgered him to promise me that he’d get Saul to come out to a bar the same time I did and to text me the minute he’d set the thing up.

Weeks passed and I was getting annoyed. The servers described Saul as very nice and having a clingy and dour ex-girlfriend that they’d like to offset with my presence on his arm. The principle difficulty seemed to be that he caught wind of the scheme and refused to be set up with a stranger. And, evidently, my nuanced and inventive personality had been described to him with only one adjective: “weird”. Thank goodness Ross had been especially loquacious that day and he also assigned one other adjective to me: “hot”, or the meeting would have been totally out of the question. As it was, the event was taking too long to come together so I took matters into my own hands and enlisted Ross’ girlfriend Annie. Annie, working on Saul’s softer side, got him to promise to come to see Ross’ band play and promptly gave me the word. I had a mere 30 minutes to change into my man-catching attire (jeans and a t-shirt that failed to meet each other halfway), attach a few feathers to my head and I was out the door.

Our eyes only had to meet once and we already doubted ourselves. He looked like a young Luke Wilson to me with his shaggy brown hair and round blue eyes (not to mention that his ironically hip t-shirt featuring either a bass or a bear or a bear catching a bass stretched across his chest in juuuuuust the right way). I had never seriously dated anyone who looked this steamy. Sure, I’ve made out with my fair share, but I didn’t get into relationships with them. My smallish amount of confidence and fair amount of cynicism required that there be a wide berth between my attractiveness and my mate’s. I had to be the princess and they had to be the frog. It’s not that I was afraid of their leaving me for someone more beautiful, it’s that I was afraid of their leaving me for someone more beautiful. After this humbling start, we managed to chat merrily about our Masters Theses, look longingly in each other’s directions half a dozen times and ultimately departed with no numbers exchanged. Only after plying Ross for more information in the following week did I learn that he was just as smitten as I was and I eagerly gave him my phone number to give to Saul.

We began slowly, as I previously mentioned, and met in public places. Saul and I talked about our lives but did not kiss. We met again and bantered about our various interests but did not kiss. We our exchanged anecdotes about our friends but did not kiss. We even discussed our futures and finally touched each other’s arms, but still, did not kiss. This agonizing courting lasted for weeks until I could stand it no longer and in a moment of desperation… went right back to Ross and told him to tell Saul to get on with it. Yes, I realize that I sound all of 13, having to transmit my messages through an intermediary, but that’s how we’re brought up in Minnesota: no direct confrontation. Deal with it.

Ross talked to Saul and informed him that it was time to take our dates from prim meetings filled with longing looks and tension-filled silences to make-out fests. It was like the floodgates, all of that pent-up sexual energy we had built up over the weeks of disbelief as to whether I actually liked him/he actually liked me, were loosed and we kissed... I’ll spare you on that point, but then something else happened, the floodgates of Saul’s mouth opened and it all came out. He sat me down on the couch, brought a box from his room and set it in front of me. “I have some things to show you”. Hoo, was I in for it. He opened that lid and inside was hundreds of photographs. We poured through the pictures under the dim light of his modest living room as he meticulously described each grainy and intermittently shocking image. I won’t tell you what was captured in each of those small rectangles of time, but I will say that any mischief you can imagine a young man with time on his hands can get into was probably pictured therein amid throngs of common landscape and group images.

Along with these pictures came stories. Stories featuring the various ways he has embarrassed himself and many of which featured poo prominently. As a first kissing date, I’ve never been confronted with a date’s detailed description of how he was embarrassed in various ways in front of friends and family by poo. I’ve never laughed so loudly and honestly in my life. I was also perplexed. Saul had been so chaste and reserved and I naturally viewed him as a man who’s life followed suit but I was suddenly confronted by a man who, in the wake of letting down his physical boundaries, was now quickly felling any illusions there might have been between us. He put it in simple terms, “my friends will tell you anyways, just to embarrass me, so I thought I’d just get it all in the open first”. I put it like this: the time we spent getting to know each other was just that, getting to know each other. The subsequent stories were Saul in a nutshell: a man operating on simple truths. If you are a friend, you get him as a friend with no illusions. If you find his embarrassments hilarious, then awesome, if you don’t, then oh well, he’ll give you a chance to tell your stories and he’ll probably laugh right along with you. How refreshing.

I knew right away that I could trust him. I wouldn’t be surprised months down the road when it was revealed some duplicity or a dark secret because he’d already proved that he held no secrets. His friends did, indeed try to out him with all of his poo stories hoping to shock me into revealing my reserves about Saul, but I was undeterred. I had heard it all already. I, in time, shared my many stores of humiliating, laughable and sometimes triumphant stories and although they didn’t involve poo, a lot of them were certainly “crappy”. He’s laughed and sympathized right along with me even if the story revealed a side of me I wasn’t proud of. It all comes down to what’s in all of us and whether we’re okay with it enough to share it. I had to grow up a lot in order to really confront my “crappy” side, and I realized almost instantly that I wanted Saul by my side as I did that growing. It’s not necessarily a romantic story, but it’s a truthful one and yes, it’s true, in more ways than one: poo brought us together.