In honor of the person who made high school a bit less atrocious

My high school friend E got himself married over Memorial Day. I really wanted to attend- the wedding was in LA and I was going to go to Disneyland, get a tan, read junk novels on the beach, and gorge myself on the mountains of Filipino food that I hoped would be served at the wedding. Chicken adobo, YUM. But then I, um, bought a house and there is also the East Coast wedding to which I must wear the shiny purple dress and, um, no money tree growing in my front yard. WHERE IS MY MONEY TREE?

So anyway. E is pretty much the only high school friend I still talk to. The last time I spoke to him he was reading me the riot act for buying a house instead of plane tickets to LA over Memorial Day. And the time before that was probably at my wedding, I think, which he attended as he reminded me several times during our most recent conversation. But we send emails and we do have a vague idea of what's going on in each other's lives. He is in the Air Force, I am wasting away in quasi-corporate culture. He has a baby, I have a house. The end.

I became E's friend in high school because he was V's friend and V was my friend. They made me an honorable Filipino and I was invited to all the karaoke parties. But later on we were friends because we were both kind of geeky and got good grades and were "solid" members of the sports teams instead of the stars. Teachers liked us (we made sure of that). We were the quintessential Good Kids and both awarded completely irrelevant outstanding student certificates when we graduated, which we didn't find particularly meaningful except for how it pissed off the kids who thought they should have been honored instead. We never really liked those kids. We had our own sets of friends, but no one terribly close and now I wonder if we were just snobbishly tolerating the rest of our class until graduation. E's family was also Catholic and he had a few of his own run-ins with the Crazy Church People. We were two of the four calculus students our senior year and the two altar servers the year my brothers were confirmed. Inertia? Perhaps.

At lunch we sometimes went to get pizza at the BX (Base Exchange, the store that sold clothes and stereos and dishes, for those of you unfamiliar with acronym-happy military culture) and E, who was almost never without a girlfriend, would talk about getting married one day and the kind of girl he'd pick. He had some stringent requirements. "She can't be taller than five foot four!" he declared one day. "She'll have to know how to cook! She'll have to to rub my feet when I get home!" I could never figure out if he was saying those things just to annoy me or whether he really believed them. I think it was a little of both. He rather enjoyed irritating me- he had a perfect sense of direction, he said, because he had iron in his nose. "Obey the nose!" he'd say, tapping it and smirking at me. (He had a horrible sense of direction, natch.) And once when we were flying to Sigonella for a basketball tournament, he told me (who has a Xanax prescription for flying purposes) a fun story about how the wings were coming off a plane in the Philippines and the pilot had to go out and duct tape them back on.  He just sat there chortling to himself while I gripped the armrests and did yoga breaths. I remember one of my teachers asking why E and I weren't boyfriend and girlfriend, because, well, we hung out so much. I awkwardly laughed it off, privately thinking to myself, "she MUST be kidding. PERISH THE THOUGHT!"

I spent an exceptionally miserable freshman year Spring Break in his Berkeley dorm, miserable because he was depressed and mopey and had no girlfriend. And years later, when he was transferred to Fairchild AFB in Spokane, we stayed up all night in his apartment talking about my impending wedding, the new war in Iraq, how he wanted to be a teacher some day and whether or not he should marry his college girlfriend. He'd met my Chinese-American boyfriend and we talked about how we didn't think about race much in high school and how much we thought about it now.

I should have gone to the wedding because then I could have seen it happen. Not that it's unbelievable (ha! if only E knew I have a website!) but because it would have been pretty awesome to see the 15-year-old hopelessly awkward and romantic kid get done up in a tux and watch him watch the bride walk down the aisle. And at the reception I could have told her stories about the guy who bought me earmuffs for Christmas, who rode around town on a little yellow moped, who had better handwriting than any girl I knew, whose hair once reached Kid 'n Play proportions and who leaves messages on my answering machine for "Magadocious". He's a pretty nifty guy. She's a lucky girl.

Comments

[Fin]

that was sweet