Memory Bank (continued part 2)

The boy I wrote about earlier…the boy, the boy, not quite man, not really a boy, the artist, he was the first male person to love me. I was on vacation with my parents, a teenager, a blond skinny, sinewy youth, full of piss and vinegar. I was innocent, the kind of innocence that allowed a genuine sweetness of character, a youthful, naive belief that most people were wonderful. I hadn’t yet been completely convinced of the evil that can lurk in dark corners. I had not experienced all the shocking horrors of adulthood. I still believed in love back then. I had seen things, sinister things that taught me to be careful when things became obvious, but I had not yet seen the ones who smile as they stabbed me in the heart. I still had the watery impressions of real love being the kind where couples walked along the beach holding hands, laughing at nothing but each other, telling secrets, kissing in the moonlight. The boy, the incredible dark haired boy, who had a smile that lit up an entire sky, he proved all my childish ideas to be true. Not once did he shatter my illusion. He created for me a dream state that would carry me through some of my darkest hours. He gave me the most priceless gift, the most precious part of himself, he gave me his whole heart first and then he gave me hope.
Being a teenager, a girl no less, I was allowed about 50 feet from my parents when we were at the beach. I was allowed as far away from my father as his whistle. The moment I couldn’t hear and respond immediately to his high pitched whistle, I was going to be in the kind of trouble that epic novels are based on. My father was serious. For my dad to have to wait a minute longer than he had to meant a lack of respect for him, it meant I was disrespecting his place in our family, and that was a no-no. I had done that, pushing those buttons until the veins in my father’s forehead stood out at attention, throbbing visibly in front of me. I had seen his eyes squint hard as he fought the temptation to throw me in the direction of where he wanted me to be, so there were no great excursions, or going “out”. There was only going up to the store at the front of the camp ground. Even the campground itself was far removed from any town or gathering places. It was Rodanthe, North Carolina, near Cape Hatteras. Our family had gone there every year for vacation for years. We left right after school was out in June, to bask in the sun, walk the white sand, fish off the pier, and surf in the waves and for me, scout the new talent every year in the form of teenage boys. The boys at eh beach with their tanned skin, no shirts, athletic builds, carrying surf boards, laughing, showing off for the bikini clad girls on towels who were quite literally laying in wait. Summers on the beach were the best. In the evening we would walk the beach, the moon so bright no other light was needed. Stars reflected off the waves created a double vision of sorts; everywhere you looked whether up or down you could see heaven.
We lived in a camper for the two weeks we were there. Our trailer was big, sleeping 6 with a bathroom, kitchen table and a sofa. It was a large cumbersome sheet metal house on wheels that my dad had to drag behind our station wagon through the mountains of West Virginia, down the hills of Virginia over the bridges, past the sand dunes to our vacation spot at the KOA in Rodanthe. My grandmother, the operatic genius of her time, rode in the back seat with my sister and me. Grandma was not a good singer, but she could hit high notes, when she thought my dad was driving too close to the car in front of us, that made the dog cover his ears. I would say it was comical watching all of us pile into the station wagon with the long trailer hitched to the back, but trust me, no one in that car was laughing. My mom would read from travel books she had collected over the prior decade as we passed “significant” places. My father wouldn’t stop to let us use the restroom, so stopping to sight see was absolutely out of the question. Every year my poor mom would gather her travel books, dog-earing the places she most wanted to visit. Every year she would ask my dad if he would stop just his once to allow her to see the place she had read about, and every year he said the same thing, “We’ll see…” Which of course meant no, but Mom remained hopeful right up until we hit the bridge to go over to the beach. She would be at the ready reading aloud how fascinating the world’s largest ball of string, or battle ground for under achievers was. She read about historical homes built in hopes of having a visiting president that actually showed up, or towns full of rubble of historical sites no longer in existence. Mom had legitimate tourist sites but having her read the obscure stuff, the really obtuse out of the way stuff that no one else knew of, not even the town’s people, well, that was our entertainment for the trip. “Did you know the first officer killed in the civil war had a servant that had aspired to live in this town?” Mom would ask sincere in her endeavor to educate us. We would all shake our heads in answer, as she dove, bifocals first, back into her reading material to pull out another gem. “Did you know the first glass factory used sand that came from a beach just 45 miles from here?” “Did you know that when Virginia became a state…” poor Mom would continue her reading with a question and answer period long after the rest of had fallen asleep, except for Dad who listened to the road and Mom.