Remember your first homecoming? Good Lord, I do. Music, French Duck, Bees, and Matt Barnson.
The fall of 1991 was an interesting time for me. I had a new girlfriend who was a year older than me, and although that relationship was fine.. I was really much more interested in her best friend. Ah, to be 16 again. So I promptly dumped my girlfriend, asked the friend to homecoming, got turned down, and promptly asked my new EX to go with me again, and please to be my girlfriend.
Got it so far?
So, wrapped up in this soap opera was my good friend Matt, the senior who had adopted me, and best of all.. he had a car. Now, I was a poor boy, and really had spent all I had getting my ridiculous suit, so Matt and I came up with a brilliant idea. First, prepare a gourmet french dinner, Duck a l’orange. Second, prepare a suitable after dance activity, (getting a friend to loan us a hot tub). Third, write a song, to be performed as a duet, to our dates.
The gourmet dinner was to be served by our friend, Van Lindberg, doing his best waiter imitation. Matt was going to drive, and a romantic teenage night was to be had by all.
We really had no interest in the parties, the drinking, the limos.. we were going to wow the girls with our creativity and ability to create this romantic situation all by ourselves.
Two days before the date, Matt and I took a full afternoon to write the chorus to “Holdin’ Hearts, Holdin’ Hands” and had the whole shebang set up. “May I have This Dance, Holdin’ Hearts, Holdin Hands? May I look into your eyes the whole night through? Tell me, can your heart believe What your eyes couldn’t see? How I’ve hoped and dreamed of someday holding you.”
Sweet, eh?
Matt’s date, Ranj and my girlfriend, were to be picked up by Matt and I the next day in his station wagon. We had everything planned out.
The next day, I was going to be picked up by Matt at school, we were going to go to pick up the corsages (to be chilled at our houses) and we were going to place the finishing touches on the song, the night, and this experience that was going to be Homecoming.
I waited and waited at school, and no Matt. i called his house again and again.. and no Matt. (no Cel phones in those days).. finally, i get an out of breath Matt on the phone as evening approached and I was about to board the Ride-On bus to go back to my house in Rockville.
“Dude.. there’s a problem” “Where are you, you were supposed to be here an hour and a half ago” Matt sighs, “I was walking home” “From where?” “The ditch where I crashed my car”
I was stunned. Our plans revolved around having independant transportation. As it turns out, a lone Bee (was it honey or Bumble) had attacked Matt in the car, and in an effort to swat it away, Matt had caused the untimely demise of his lovely limo of love.
Well, this was it.. there was no way we were going to escape from this situation. In 24 hours, 2 lovely dates-to- be were awaiting their romantic evening, the Corsages were paid for, the Chicken ready to be cooked. The song, unfinished languished on paper in my notebook.. and it looked very much like all was going to be for naught..
or was it? TO BE CONTINUED…
The Bee…
OK, now, bear with me, my memory has been a bit fuzzy my whole life. It’s something I’ve come to cope with, and is part of the reason I keep a weblog now. In ten years, I probably won’t remember how I think or feel, or what was going on in my life, or who I knew, and this may be a helpful reminder.
That said, it was a honey bee.
It landed on my left eye.
Stupid, inexperienced driver that I was, with only a few months of driving under my belt (yeah, I was seventeen; my folks got divorced when I was sixteen, and I really had little motivation to get my license), I of course left both eyes closed and tried to gently “swat it away”. I used to be mortally afraid of bees, having been repeatedly stung as a child.
The first clue I had that something was wrong was that the car began to bump mercilessly. The second clue was that the bee decided to get lost, and I opened my eyes just as a tree branch came crashing through my windshield, spraying me with broken glass and missing the tip of my nose by a few scant inches. I tried to regain control, but forgot I had a brake pedal, ran over a small fir tree, and sailed off a ravine, landing flat on the bottom making my beloved Volvo station wagon resemble the letter “V”. It was tough to get out, and the car was totalled.
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Matthew P. Barnson