OCR Text |
Show 150 Avenues policy, though he didn't give a reason, and I was watching for his noticeable brown track from my balcony. Steve was my friend, and had been for a long time. True, some of that might have been by default: When you haven't updated your social strategy from that given to you as a child-never talk to strangers, be careful who you leave the yard with, and always lock the door-you do a lot of dancing with whomever brings you. Still, the friendship was in some ways unusual. Even though I only lived 45 miles away, I had spent the past two years systematically shooting down the lines to my childhood and hometown like cables holding up a bridge, until Steve and the bi-monthly phone conversations with my mother were the only cables left. By this time, I usually only reminded people that I was a redneck Mormon from a place called Pleasant Grove, Utah when I needed to lower expectations. Yes, my responses in this conversation might have been uninformed, insensitive and/or crass-but I'm from Pleasant Grove, so the fact that my comments included neither grandiose poetics about the kick ass qualities of the Lord, nor a spontaneous chant for tax cuts, means this conversation might have gone better than you think. Steve was about six foot one, with a body that had adapted itself to carrying around multiple cans of paint every day for the past five years. Bulky shoulders, balanced steps. He could carry four open cans of paint up twelve stories without spilling a drop. I took a part-time job working with him one summer and spilled paint every day, which seemed to just confuse him. Those deliberate steps were just an inseparable part of his overall movement by now. |