Melissa
For the first week or so I left the larger back bedroom empty. I was in no rush to move to the bigger bedroom, although I had no reason not to. The apartment was generally quiet. I let the guinea pigs out of their cages to run around as I usually did, but with less furniture I figured it would be easier to catch them when it was time to put them back. Instead, I lost the older one, Nova. For an hour, I had no idea where she went and thought Lori would kill me when she found out. Turns out I just accidentally locked her in the closet. I had gotten something out and she had snuck in without my knowledge. It was only an act of desperation that I even looked in the closet. There she was just sitting in the middle of the closet without a care in the world.
Out of the blue I was invited up to Boulder to see a Beatles Tribute band that was playing a street fair at the Pearl Street Mall from a girl named Melissa. About a year before, my friend Dan (Jesus Dan) had shot me an IM telling me a good friend of his had just moved out to Boulder, Colorado for school and didn’t know anybody. He asked if I would meet up with her and show her around and asked if he could give her my E-mail address. I told him he could and we had sent each other about two e-mails back and forth and I never heard from her again until she recently friended me on a social media site.
When she sent me the message inviting me up, she mentioned that she saw the advertisement and thought of me. At first I was reluctant. I never met her face to face, so even though we had a mutual friend, it sort of felt like meeting someone from the Internet. In the end, I was interested and it was something to do, so I agreed to meet her there.
When I first got there, I thought I would never pick her out of the crowd, but it ended up being relatively easy. We watched the band and walked up and down the length of the mall talking. Not about anything big, mostly small talk and getting to know each other. She had just recently broken up with her boyfriend. So we lamented our situations. There wasn’t much chemistry so we didn’t even try to force it, which was good. It just enabled us to hang out and have a good time.
The fact that we were both from Long Island and each had a circle of friends that intertwined, yet we didn’t meet was actually kind of fun to dissect. By the time night came, the regular mall Street Performers came out and Melissa really wanted me to see this one guy. He had every Zip Code in the United States memorized. He would call people out of the crowd, ask them where they were from by Zip code, move them to their spot on an imaginary map and then spout out a scenario in which this one from Atlanta would call this one from some tiny town in Idaho. It was actually quite amazing. Then He’d ask someone else what town they were from and tell them their Zip Code. The whole time he was 100% correct. Even when I threw out the zip code from a little tiny locale on Long Island that I happened to know the Zip Code for.
One of the last things we did was stop and see a homeless man that played the blues on a beat up saxophone. Melissa visited with him often and his stories were amazing. I remember listening to him and thinking, if I wasn’t with Melissa, I wouldn’t even have stopped more than a second or two. This guy had been around and played with some big names, but a streak of bad luck put him in this position. He didn’t blame anyone but himself and seemed content nonetheless.
Boulder had a large number of homeless because the people were generous who came and the library would allow them to sleep in the building during the day as long as they didn’t bother the patrons. Overall, Boulder truly was a big hippie town. Even the homeless were a different breed than what I came across in New York.
Afterwards, we said goodbye and I drove home a little more open minded than I had in the past.