That Time I went on my first date #2

We sat next to each other at school that year, her hands folded in her lap, blue eyes vaguely turning towards mine, her broad ruddy face smiling at our conversation.

“How was class?”

“Class was good. It was interesting. “

“Really?”

“No. Actually, now that I think of it, it wasn’t all that interesting.”

She wasn’t the prettiest girl, but she fascinated me. She fascinated me because she was the first girl who wasn’t currently dating one of my friend’s with whom I could have a conversation that lasted more than a sentence or two. I had, since puberty, been horrified of speaking to the opposite sex. Though like everyone else who had passed through puberty I found them endlessly riveting, eyes, hair, thighs, chest, all.

Around Bidwell Park the Sycamaores start to arrive, their white bark, peeling like a sun burn, mixed with maples, Scrub Oak, Canyon Live Oak, and California Black Oak. When I was a child, I used to skip small stones across the water at odd bits of detritus, mostly soda cans, their aluminum rims reflecting back the sunlight that skimmed through the leaves of mostly oak, their cantankerous roots, exposed by the park’s river. The water in Big Chico Creek, mostly shallow, breaking at slight collections of rocks, pooling outward in ripples that are caught by the light, washing towards shore like waves from a boat, and some of the sycamores and oaks leaning down by the water, with large vines that stretch across the water, such that at many points the Creek has an awning of green. The green underside of leaves, the flickers of pale blue water, and the perfectly shaped stones made for skipping across the water that looked like sunlight. One, two, three, four, five, six skips, and up out of the water, if I’d gotten the right arm angle, pinging into a plastic cup with a satisfying sound, or, if everything had gone perfectly, dislodging the cup and sending it down the creek, bobbing and weaving through the rocks like a boxer on ESPN Friday night fights, like Mike Tyson, who haunted my childhood with is malevolent wink.

We finished driving down Mangrove and turned into the park, my mind whirring, here in this familiar place where I’d been to camp, skipped stones while my brother played baseball, swam countless times as a child, my feet slipping on the mossy underside of One Mile, a small portion of the creek cordoned off for public swimming, who’s banks were full of young families or college students passing beers and throwing Frisbees. A hippie town. A college town.

I drove through the park, kicking up bits of dust, through the small paved roads through corridors of oaks, ringed by dried grass, golden, and brittle bits of star thistle, who’s burrs got stuck in your socks and had to be removed from inside the shoe, their spiny shapes affixed to the top of my ankle.

Some years we’d hear a story about a mountain lion that had killed a jogger in Upper Bidwell Park. A large swath of land, rimmed by the rising foothills on either side, a thin line of water dotted by swimming holes, Alligator Hole, Bear Hole, where occasionally someone would wander out and get sucked down a chute of water, or get their leg trapped and drown, and it’s all we’d read about for a week in the Chico Enterprise Record, such that Bear Hole, without my ever having been there, took on the specter of some kind of person gobbling bit of water, when really it was just a swimming hole.

As a child, when I used to be driving across town to my best friend Brandon’s house, we’d sometimes see charred ashes along the side of the road where someone had tossed a cigarette into the dried grass, which must have lit like tinder, scorching the underside of the Live Oaks, sometimes raging for a few acres before the fires were put out. I was scared of fire too. Of course, I was scared of nearly everything but mostly girls.

My car chugged won the lane and eventually we reached a small stand of trees, a brown bench or two, chained in place around a solid cement block, and, off to the right, a standard issue park grill, black with long metal grates . We got out of the car, I almost made a brief run to open her door, but I couldn’t quite make it, so I got out the sandwiches, two Cold-Cut Trios that I paid for hesitantly, not because I didn’t want to, but because I wasn’t sure that she wanted me to, reaching back in my wallet, an awkward catching of her eye.

“I got this,” I said, pulling two fives from my black leather wallet.

“Are you sure?” she said. “I have money.” And I almost took it, hesitating, waiting, for her. “It’s fine, Andy.”

I got it, I said, flushing scarlet, as I’d done since kindergarten when presented with any situation that involved me talking in class or worse yet, talking to a girl. In those cases, I could feel the pin pricks rising up my neck and the flush reaching my cheeks, so I always kept my answers short, often cutting my thoughts off, staring at the ground and waiting for someone else to pick up the conversation.

“I got it,” I said, sliding the five dollars across the table to the college aged girl working behind the counter, dark hair in a pony tail, and a name tag that said Amy, her shirt, slightly stained by some of the oils, but standard issue black with a white apron. I got change for the ten and slipped the coins into my pocket. My father carried a change purse, but he was from another generation. I considered change useless and let it slip from my pocket all the time, collecting dust on the floor or showing up in the bottom of my underwear drawer next to old G.I. Joe’s with whom I’d staged vast and involved wars with as a child, outfitting my whole room in blankets and pitting them against an array of cars, a few Transformers because they were too expensive for our single parent home and a few stray dinosaurs who were led by a large black T-Rex with a green belly.

I took the change and the bag of sandwiches and we headed back towards the car. I walked around to her side and opened the door, and she smiled at me.