10. "I have to go mail a letter" Hailey W., 1989.
With seven words uttered lazily into the phone, Hailey makes it clear that she's not in the mood to have a conversation with me, that I blew it with her on my visit to Pomona the day before. Couldn't she just have said "I have to go" or "There's someone on the other line"? Mail a letter? It was 1:00 and she lived down the street from the post office! Still, it was my own damn fault.
9. "Are you still going to marry that woman?" Kimberly J., 2001.
Okay. Enough time has passed that feelings shouldn't be hurt. A few months before the big day, I ran into one of my former classmates at the May Day Cafe on Bloomington Ave. in Minneapolis. Kimberly was feisty and kind of cool. She never drove. She always rode the bus or her bicycle and, like Hailey, was a single mother. She liked Modest Mouse and once wore her hair in (white) dreads (when it was cool, years before Jamiroquai). She was on a neighborhood council. Anyway, I finally figured out she sort of liked me when she would email me with statistics-related questions a full year after the class in which I was her T.A. ended, asking for tutoring. So I tutored her. Kimberly had seen me with Laurel around town a couple of times. This time, she ran into me when I was alone at the cafe and asked me the above question. I said yes and continued eating my maple scone.
8. "Jamiroquai is awesome." Ken, 2007.
Ken is cool. Ken reads difficult fiction and appreciates war films. Ken drinks hard liquor and, like Kimberly, doesn't drive. Even more impressive is that he doesn't drive in L.A. Anyway, Ken is the last person on earth I would figure for a fan of the jazzy hippy-ish jam band collective.. So, when we were playing poker up in the Altadena hills and a song came on and someone asked who it was and I said (resignedly) "Jamiroquai" Ken responded with the above quote.
(Had to Google "Jamiroquai" for the correct spelling.)
(to be continued)
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