Swim team

I practice tennis at the Y. The courts are next to an indoor pool. It's been so temperate lately that they leave the floor to ceiling windows open, and swim season just started. As I walked across the court each time after my turn in the hot seat, I'd see bodies lined up against the window. Adolescent boys, their new muscles pop out of their skin like novelty balloons, and the girls they talk to seem light years older than them. Light years older than I remember being at that age.

At that age, I was nearing my inglorious end to swim team. Not so much a loser as filler. I was just another body to put in an empty heat. I always worked just hard enough to get through it. (I never really understood the passion that drives athletes to put every ounce of themselves into competition.) It was, as sports have always been for me, a social outlet for the very shy.

No matter what happened during the school year or who I was then, during the summer, I had friends on the team. There was no one from my class to take the lead and ignore me like usual. My teammates were older or younger, and I was a part of the group.

During meets, we'd write our events on our arms in permanent marker, and draw hearts in zinc oxide on our backs, to tan in our own summer tattoos. Each poolhouse candy counter was reassuredly the same; we'd get Zotz and Chik-o-Stik and a particular kind of red liquorice I've never been able to find anywhere else, and we'd split up our spoils.

That's where I learned how to flirt, with two guys a year ahead of me, who would never have looked at me twice--and didn't--any other time of the year. And with inappropriately friendly college boys who were terrible coaches for teenage girls. Years later, I still have a crush on one of the former guys that I have never been able to shake.

Then one summer, I got a part-time job, and my parents never mentioned swim team again. As an inherently (where did I get this??) lazy person, no matter how much I enjoy a sport or exercise, I won't do it unless pushed into it. So I forgot about sun and swimming and boys in bathing suits, and started pushing cones at an ice cream shop in town.

The kids in the window reminded me, though, of what a good way to pass the summer.

Smoking

Tonight was the perfect weather for porch sitting. We had Meghan and Lauren over for grilling and s'mores. Afterwards, Lauren left, Meghan and Tim read magazines in the living room, and I sat on the porch, amidst some citronella candles, enjoying my two-cider buzz and an herbal cigarette. (And by "herbal," I really mean herbal--a blend Tim makes, with a lot of spicy weedy planty things, mostly mullen). It was a perfect, calm moment, and it made me think about smoking.

During one of the rare times my family owned a TV, the rules were "one hour of TV a week." My pick when I was little was--I don't know why--"Hollywood Classics of the 30s and 40s." So ingrained in my subconscious is the sheer glamour and sexiness that is smoking. Movie stars back then knew how to make it look so appealing.

This didn't particularly lure me into the addiction as a teen or anything, but it did lead me to date at least one person simply because of the way he looked with a cigarette in his fingers.

I met him in an English class. Sort of. He sat across the room from me, piercing blue eyes, during a time when I was receiving mysterious secret admirer notes. I marched up to him and asked if they were from him. He said, "no; I wish I had thought of it, though," and we went to a poetry reading together. We had a few dates, then he vanished off the face of the earth (an mysterious thing--in my opinion--for a college student mid-semester) for a few months (I won't even go into the psychotic lengths to which I went to locate him). When he turned back up, it was obvious we were unsuited to each other, that it was the smoking that lured me in. It was the satisfaction and the ease, the downright sexiness of it.

I haven't dated many smokers, though. I prefer to admire it from afar. The first one, though, broke my heart, and after, I took up smoking because I missed him. An odd thing to start at 25, 26. It didn't take. I only smoked for about four months. But in some ways it gave me purpose. Not purpose exactly--something to do with myself in a bar.

During my single times in Chicago, I pushed myself into solo activities. Movies, cafes, even dinners at nice restaurants, those I accomplished with ease. But I always wanted to be able to sit in a bar and have a drink by myself. It never really worked because I didn't know what to do. I didn't go to sports bars, so I couldn't pass the time watching the game; I never went anyplace enough that the bartender would shoot the breeze with me; and the bars I frequented were always too dark to read in. Smoking solved my problem. Thus my greatest accomplishment in that regard was going to my favorite swanky bar to have a dirty martini and a few cigarettes. No one came up to light my cigarette or offer to buy me a second drink, which was something I halfway expected due to movies, but since I didn't really like people approaching me anyway, it was ok.

Then I dated a hard-core smoker for a few months, and it really lost its glamour. If I drink enough, I'll crave a smoke, but in the end, it's not a good thing.

The herbal mix, though, it's good at the right moments. Like right now, in the cooling fall night, under a nearly full moon, with a happy belly and a cider in my hand.

Moments of grace

Last night Tim and I went to the cute section of town, the neighborhood known as Old Cloverdale. The one block in Montgomery that has an independent movie theatre, the live music venue, a few restaurants, and a real coffeehouse. The restaurant where we had dinner was a tiny, hole-in-the-wall pizza place. The building had 15-foot ceilings, hammered tin on the wall, and local artwork hanging all around. The floor was dusty and scuffed painted wood, and the tip jar by the register was made of hand-blown glass. Our waitress was wearing a hemp necklace and a headwrap that I would bet covered up hippie-girl dreadlocks. The other waitress had a back tattoo. I didn't know places and people like this existed here.

I probably spent the whole dinner exclaiming over how cool it was, and just seeping in its atmosphere. And the pizza was delicious. With a whole-wheat crust, even. It's hard to articulate what a place like that does for my soul. I wouldn't probably think twice of a restaurant like that in Chicago. But it reminded me of counter-culture, which I really didn't think existed here.

(Can organic food even be considered counter-culture? Sounds like a stretch to me, but . . . the world is different down here.)

After, we asked the waitress about a good bar. She recommended one by saying, "Lots of gays go there, but it's still cool." (Which makes me wonder what kind of recommendation she thinks she's making. Which also makes me wonder how many gays and lesbians live here—someplace I believe is pretty gay-unfriendly.) It was in the Old Alabama section of town. The business area, near the Capitol and the courthouse.

The Montgomery downtown looked like any small-town downtown. Old, decaying department stores, wide empty streets; a ghost town once 5 o'clock strikes and the government workers go home. A wasteland. I wouldn't want to be there alone after dark. In front of the recommended bar (closed on Mondays), cars were parked on the middle yellow line, and a few people were just hanging out in them. It was surreal.

So we went back to Old Cloverdale to 1048, an old house that has been renovated into a music joint. Dusty wooden floors, sports on TV and blues on the jukebox, the place was quiet but the bar stools filled with men contemplating their drafts. Two older men played backgammon at a table in the corner. They had Newcastle on draft, but it was the kind of place that makes me want to drink PBR from the bottle, shoot whiskey from a jar, and slowly draw in on a cigarette. It was home to me. I'm glad we found it.

If we can find moments of grace here like this night, then I feel like I belong somewhere.