When I was 16, I met Bru. I had a boyfriend at the time, and he was great. But I am not going to write about that first relationship. Instead, I'm going to write about the first time I was struck by lightning, the first time I fell in love.
It was summer, the summer before my junior year of high school, the summer before I left home for boarding school. I went to a pool party sponsored by my church youth group with all my usual cronies, who were also great. They were smart and interesting. But it was Meridian, MS, and I was hungry, though I didn't know it, for something else. I wanted to be in the flow of ideas; I wanted to live inside the novels and poems that I spent all my time pouring over.
I was hanging out in the water with all my girl friends, chatting and laughing and being teenagers, when he walked up. He was red headed with a red goatee, tall and skinny, and he seemed very, very old to me because he was in college. He was a friend of my youth minister from out of town, a kid from his last church, and I have no memory of how we ended up in conversation. I remember him walking into the fenced-in pool deck, and the next thing I remember is the two of us, far from anyone else in the pool, talking about Dante.
He was smart and passionate about ideas and open, and we talked about every book I had ever read and some I hadn't. We talked about Jewish mysticism, and he told me that he didn't believe in hell. I came from a family of slightly unorthodox thinkers, so it's not like he opened new worlds, but he was young and red headed. I was ripe to fall in love with an iconoclast and his goatee.
After the pool party, I had a date with my boyfriend, during which I constantly thought about Bru. The next morning was Sunday, and I insisted on going to the early service (which I usually hated with all those damn guitars) because I knew he would be there. I stared at him all through church and wondered if everyone could tell what I was thinking. The insides of me were in such a glow that I thought it must have been visible. After church, we skipped Sunday school and stood talking behind the youth building for that hour. He kissed me on the cheek when he left.
I thought of him most of the time until his first letter came, and then I thought of him every second. He worked as a stock boy in a warehouse, and he wrote to me during his break, as he sat in the back, looking out of the open door into an approaching thunderstorm. His letters were thick with pages, full of poems he copied out for me to read, full of descriptions of the sky at night, full of his ideas about god and literature and his future.
My letters were written on yellow legal paper with a jagged ripped edge at the top. Stationary was too small and pretentious for the raw feelings and hopes that I penned. I told him about what I hoped for at boarding school, about meeting him and the outside world and longing to be in it, and about books. Always books. Some people fall in love over wine or scenery or dancing. For me it was books.
When I read Tennyson again or Keats or Jane Austen or L.M. Montgomery, I felt something new. I knew about "the baths of all the Western stars" now; I wanted to reach them. I had seen the "huge cloudy symbols of a high romance;" I wanted to live long enough to write them down. I loved Colonel Branden and Gilbert Blythe with new intensity. I thought of Bru when I read, and I thought of reading when I wrote to him. Perhaps my memory of him is so strong now and still so white hot because it is bound up with my memories of stories and words and my own awakening as a reader.
Eventually, the letters stopped coming. I went away to school and sank into learning like quicksand. I didn't miss him much because I was too busy loving everything and everybody, and my mind was full of ideas all the time. But I thought of him, especially when my poetry club met at dusk under the trees that looked like broccoli and read out loud.
I ended up choosing Sewanee, the college where he went, but not because of him. I can see why we both ended up there, though. It was the physical embodiment of the things that had drawn us together. It was lovely, more lovely than any place I have ever seen since, and it was old with well-worn rituals and a powerful lust for words. I met him there, was shocked to find we had both grown up and apart, and never really got to know him any better.
But we met once, on a bridge in Abbo's Alley, after it had snowed. It was a stone footbridge with several inches of snow piled on the railing, and the sun was glaring on the frozen trees. My grandfather had died the day before, and I was taking a last walk through the lovely campus before I left to go home for his funeral. Bru was there, and his red hair flamed out against the whiteness. I don't remember much that we said. I cried about Papaw, and he told me that he stopped writing to me when his father died.
He has stayed with me while far longer relationships have faded away. I still think of him every time I mention Dante (and that is far more often than you might imagine) and I still like red heads best of all.
7/29/10
