The Potholes of Memory Lane

After months of struggling over snowbanks and slipping on ice patches, it's finally spring! I just love this time of year. Everything suddenly takes on a new brightness. The flowers are starting to sprout, the trees are beginning to bud and the air smells fresh and clean.

Everytime we reach this point in the year, a sense memory is triggered for me. I am catapulted back in time to my early adolescent days. Don't ask me why. Maybe it's because spring always makes one feel younger and this was the jumping off point for youth. Or maybe it's because those were the first years that I distinctly remember actually acknowledging the spring air and equating it with feelings of hope.

As I was driving around today, with the radio blaring and my windows wide open (yeah, I probably looked like some old rocker of a hound), I suddenly thought of my first kiss. It happened at the beginning of spring at my first real "cool kids" party, the year I turned thirteen. I attended wearing an awful pink wool sweater ... I still shudder in embarassment over my ensemble. Is it weird that I still remember all the details?

It was a pretty straightforward chaste kiss, albeit on the lips, by one of the coolest, cutest guy at the big local high school. To him, it meant nothing. In fact, days later when I called him on the phone (after finagling his number from a mutual friend), he hadn't the foggiest who I even was. (He was a total player, even at fourteen). To me, it opened up a whole can of worms. He didn't just bestow a kiss upon my lips, he opened up a whole new range of possibilities to me that I'd never even considered. Thus began my whole journey into a world known as "rebellion" (also obsessive puppy love, as I carried a torch for this guy for about three or four years).

Now, adolescent rebellion is a distasteful subject to any parent, but to an Asian one, it is considered the root of all evil and must be quashed immediately. The very shameful thought of enduring even a single day with a rebellious teenager is enough to drive any respectable Asian to commit hari kiri on their front lawn. So naturally, my foray into that emotional jungle caused a huge chain reaction on the home front.

In any event, I came through it alive and very much kicking, although not without many great struggles and battles fought. Remember Tom Stoppard's play (and subsequent brilliantly translated film) "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead"? The final scene has the title characters hanging from the gallows with their last words being "There must have been a point ..."

I think April 11th, 1981 was my point. I can't help but wonder what would have happened if I hadn't been the lucky recipient of that kiss. Would I have taken the roads that eventually led me to where I am today? Or would I instead have become the Asian parent's wet dream of a child?

Whatever the answer is, all I can say is this:

Wherever you may now be, Michael Hawthorne, thank you for having felt enough pity (or had enough alcohol in your system) to initiate and introduce a scrawny, underdeveloped, geeky and socially inept girl into the rites of normalcy and adolescence (two words that should probably never be spoken in the same breath).