Waiting in the carpool lane at your children’s school can make one a library full of memories that take the form of snapshots. The snapshot of a young and beautiful teacher’s aide, holding her coffee in the crook of her left arm as she opens up parent’s cars, and helps children navigate their backpacks to the curb.
Or the snapshot of oldest member of the maintenance staff, who sports a Pancho Villa mustache and doggedly starts each and every day waving cars safely through, as distracted parents mournfully muse about the list of chores, phone calls and meetings they need to attend to before they find themselves back here, six and a half hours later in the same line at the same spot, and me, Little Miss Suzy Fucking Snapshot, waiting patiently as children both in my backseat and on the asphalt in front of my car, bounce around, laughing and complaining as they tease each other mercifully.
But the only thing I’m mournfully musing about is the “Dear Jon” e-mail I wrote in my bed late last night after talking at length to the first man I’ve dated seriously since my divorce.
I met him online through a dating service. He was the fourth man I had actually met after exchanging mostly forced but a few clever e-mails with the first three. Their order of ascension by job title went like this: Professional House Sitter who’s car sported a bumper sticker that read “Horn Broken, Watch for finger,” A Drummer in a now defunct 80’s hair band that once opened for White Snake in the San Joaquin Valley and a Republican Lobbyist.
I actually had the best e-mail chemistry with the Republican Lobbyist. I didn’t even realize he was a Republican let alone a lobbyist until the middle of our first drink at a seafood restaurant where we had agreed to meet. He had told me that he did Environmental work for a living in our e-mails. So there we were awkwardly trying to recreate our online chemistry in real time.
Our conversation quickly turned to our occupations. As he was going into depth about his “Job” I realize he was not only a Republican, but also a Lobbyist on issues against the Environment, and was one of the people responsible for the bill that killed one of the first Electric cars. Which was the topic of a documentary film I had just watched the night before.
I couldn’t believe that the person I had just spent two weeks trading witticisms on every topic imaginable. From the irony that String Theory is both completely opposite of the Theory of Relativity, yet can only exist formulaically by relying on the Theory of Relativity - to finding out that our favorite movie was the Big Lebowski. We even went through a three and a half day period where we would start off our e-mails with lines from the film itself like, “Shut the fuck up Donny!” or “Is this your homework?” Occasionally he would even refer to me as his little on-line Nihilist.
I shot the rest of my Cosmo, canceled my crab-cake appetizer and high tailed it out to Valet. All the while, throwing out wild made-up excuses. I’m not sure but I think I even heard myself exclaim, “Damn it Jim! The sutures on my hysterectomy scar are a itching me like hell!”
The next day Jon cold e-mailed me with a simple question, “What’s your latest adventure?”
So here I sit, five and a half months later in mid-adventure, in the carpool lane at my children’s school. As I put the car in gear I think about the last line of the first “Dear Jon” e-mail I have written since my divorce. Which ended, “I’m certainly glad I met you and I wish you much happiness and success.”
I slowly drive toward the School’s exit, glancing up to my rear view mirror, and for a moment I watch my children run to their classrooms, their blue windbreakers flapping against the damp January breeze. A perfect little snapshot.
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