the boy with the sherlock holmes hat

My mother brought over a box of my old things. Among the photo albums and yellowed greeting cards, I found my senior yearbook. I am not a yearbook kind of girl. I never bought a yearbook until my senior year. I don’t know why I bought one then. I did not enjoy the school part of my senior year. I was actually not in school very much. I skipped at least two or three classes each day.

But, there it was- Picture This, the great class of 1988.

So, I dated alot of boys. Boys were the one thing I was good at. Extracurricular activities, not so much. Grades? only when and if I found it interesting. I never got along with other girls. Looking through my yearbook, I realized that I have forgotten 99% of the details about the boys I dated. With only a few exceptions, I do not even remember their names. I remember even fewer first and last names. What I do remember are snapshot-like moments, rich in imagery.

Instead of faces or yearbook-handsome sorts of important achievement related details, the memories I have stored away are small, random moments of beauty. A cream colored cable knit sweater. The taste of cigarette smoke on a rooftop. The welded junkyard metal sheeting on the floor a battered jeep. Driving too fast and spinning out on an abandoned red dirt road. A typewritten short-story. Small moments of feeling awake, and times of wanting to be a part of the world - to just breathe it all and hold the alive deep in my lungs. A feeling like being underwater and never wanting to surface.

I remember music, the passage of night landscape out the passenger windows of cars, driving anywhere but home. And I remember the boy with the Sherlock Holmes hat.

I remember every detail about the boy with the Sherlock Holmes hat. He wore a Sherlock Holmes hat to school, in 1986, in Florida. He was two years older than me, and he was the smartest boy I'd ever met. He made me care about getting into the National Honor Society; he was the vice-president and I just wanted to have a reason to be where he was. I figured that if I was around, he'd have to notice me - so I made good grades for an entire year just so I could inducted into his club and stand there in a white honor dress while he lit my little white drippy honor candle.

I remember the way his hair curled slightly at the nape of his neck. He was tall. He asked me out for first time while we were sitting in the bleachers of the Civic Center, right in the middle of the Billy Graham Crusade. We saw Crocodile Dundee. The movie sucked, but I did not care.

I remember his rust colored car, an older 1970’s model without bucket seats - that lovely expanse of front seat, the way you could just curl up like a cat in the crook of an arm is still one of the things I miss most about the world I grew up a part of. Why pamper life's complexities when the leather runs smooth on the passenger's seat? Charming indeed.

I remember talking and not talking on the wooden Florida pier at night, surrounded by woods and dark lake water. There were so many stars, and always the night air was like a womb, like the inside of a blade of grass, curling your hair and making everything damp. And I remember Bob Dylan.

THe boy with the Sherlock Holmes hat loved Bob Dylan. In the eighties, when everyone wanted Casio keyboards and razor thin ties to be like a MTV veejay, but he would play Dylan on an old tape player and the cadence of the songs would reach back to my earliest childhood memories: bonfires, and my bare feet in the sand, clothes that smelled like woodsmoke and flannel blankets, Kool-aid in styrofoam cups without ice, Maggie’s farm, and my blue-eyed son, and we're gonna fly down into an easy chair. His music spoke a language that I knew with memories deeper than words. I was going nowhere, but I didn't think twice because it was allright. Buckets of moonbeams in my hands.

He was the first boy that I really loved; the only one that I thought about for years afterwards with regret that I had been so, so young at the time - so completely not self-posessed.

Right before he went away for good, he took me out and we drove around. He was not a staying around sort of person. He told me that whatever happened between us in the future - he wanted me to hear a song. He wanted me to listen to the words know that, whatever happened, this song was the truth about how he felt about me. I sat next to him and he drove down the canopy roads between our houses and Bob Dylan sang - Emotionally Yours . I will always be, emotionally yours.

It was enough. In the end, I forgave him for every way he broke my heart. He remains, in my mind, incandescent.

Even his leaving was beautiful.

Come baby, find me, come baby, remind me of where I once begun.
Come baby, show me, show me you know me, tell me you're the one.
I could be learning, you could be yearning to see behind closed doors.
But I will always be emotionally yours.
Come baby, rock me, come baby, lock me into the shadows of your heart.
Come baby, teach me, come baby, reach me, let the music start.
I could be dreaming but I keep believing you're the one I'm livin' for.
And I will always be emotionally yours.
It's like my whole life never happened,
When I see you, it's as if I never had a thought.
I know this dream, it might be crazy,
But it's the only one I've got.
Come baby, shake me, come baby, take me, I would be satisfied.
Come baby, hold me, come baby, help me, my arms are open wide.
I could be unraveling wherever I'm traveling, even to foreign shores.
But I will always be emotionally yours.