Life at 8 mph

by Peter Bowling Anderson

  Even when we were out running errands totally unrelated to fundraising, he always wore his signs and paragraphs hoping someone might be intrigued enough to inquire. He stored extra T-shirts and CDs in his backpack strapped to his chair’s handles in case he got on a roll and merchandise flew off the shelves. I took him to different shopping centers with stores he hadn’t haunted so new customers could be found and old ones wouldn’t run for cover. He emailed and called dozens and dozens of friends and associates about his mission to acquire a new dog.

  He was determined not to settle, even if his hard work didn’t pan out in the end. He would see it through. This was one of the most important lessons I learned from Richard during our years together. What could be lived with or without wasn’t the correct compass for navigation. It was merely plugging holes in a leaky boat. Perseverance wasn’t synonymous with progress. What mattered was the choice itself with its intended target. Where was all the toil to be channeled—survival or discovery? More was typically learned from failures and heartbreak than triumphs, but they had to be risked first. My broken boat in the middle of the sea wasn’t going anywhere, yet it remained afloat. It looked and felt a lot safer than the bottomless unknown surrounding me. Yet I was stuck with a compass that pointed only around, never to, one I’d been clutching since setting sail. It was the lone way I knew to travel, though I never arrived elsewhere.

  It was hard to chicken out around Richard. His fearlessness made it difficult to justify waiting till next time for anything. If he could take rejection on a daily basis, why couldn’t I? If he could walk boldly in a wheelchair, why couldn’t I step out on faith? If he could shove worry and embarrassment out of the way to get where he needed, couldn’t and shouldn’t I, too? Richard held me accountable without saying a word. Simply sitting next to him each day forced me out of my comfort zone.

  And so it was that at the end of my second summer with Richard, I joined the ranks of online daters. It had worked for Richard, so maybe it would be a positive experience for me, too. Plus, I liked the idea of writing a girl first before getting the chance to blow it in person. It gave me some time to stockpile goodwill in case I disappointed her six different ways later.

  I perused a few sites, but some of them had a mountain of paperwork to fill out before I became “active” (just the word gave me a knot in my stomach), while others seemed more like casual hook-up spots, which made me picture whips and penicillin. I needed something less complicated and more Christian, since faith was important to me and something I was looking for in a “match” (it was going to take me a while to get used to these terms).

  Finally, I came across a Christian site that was similar to the one where Richard had found Della, yet different enough that I didn’t feel like I was trying to clone their love life. That would’ve been weird. I filled out my biographical information, interests, hobbies, dreams, goals, and preferences, and uploaded a few photos. Bryan helped me with the technical aspects of this daring operation, though initially I told no one else, not even Richard or my mom. I didn’t want to jinx the undertaking by placing too many expectations on it, and I wanted to avoid letting anyone down. Plus, I didn’t need the pressure of “The Great Wife Hunt” hovering over me. That definitely wasn’t going to help me enjoy the process of hurling myself into the ring. This was a top-secret mission with the highest possible security clearance. Even I didn’t want to know the details.

  As I quickly learned, the aim was winks and smiles. Once I was out there floundering about in the digital sea for my fellow mixers and minglers to study, I could either contact somebody or wait to receive a wink or a smile. After a few days without getting either, my leaky boat was looking awfully inviting. What the heck was I doing out here in cyberspace searching for a chance encounter with romance like I was on the Starship Enterprise probing the galaxy for new life forms? What did I really think I was going to find? A time machine transporting me back to high school so I could ask out the goddess in fourth period who didn’t know my name? This was nuts. Even worse, it was a cruel new brand of torture the Digital Age delivered right to my bedroom, leaving me no escape.

  I knew what I had to do. It was what Richard did when he got on his site, though it hadn’t taken him a week and a half to pull the trigger—more like a minute and a half. I had to find someone promising and shoot her my best wink. Or smile. Which one? This was a whole other riddle I hadn’t anticipated. Did one send a slightly different message than the other? Did a smile merely inform her I thought she seemed nice, while a wink purred a dinner invitation? What if I doubled up and used both? Did that seem desperate? Smothering? Did it violate online dating’s unwritten rulebook, like waiting three days to call a girl after getting her number in the real world? My natural inclination was to use a wink, smile, wave, fireworks, and any other emoticon I could get my hands on to cover all my bases, plus an essay on my childhood and a top-ten list of my favorite road trip songs. But that was the old me, and now I was doing the opposite of what I normally would. It was smooth operator time. I even turned on Sade as I searched for the lucky lady to receive one of my smiles.

  Then I turned off the music because I felt like I should have a moustache, with my shirt unbuttoned revealing a gold chain.

  It wasn’t as easy to find someone to contact as I thought it’d be. I figured there would be plenty of attractive girls with intriguing profiles, which there were. That was the simple part. I needed to find someone who either lived nearby or didn’t mind a long-distance relationship, or the fact that I wasn’t twenty-five anymore. Or that I worked as a caregiver and was an unsuccessful artist with no money living with my friend’s parents, with a car on life support. Whose biggest accomplishment to date was living in South Florida, with no promising prospects on the horizon. And no health insurance.

  Who wouldn’t want to sign up for that?! Wow! I’d laid waste to the competition.

  I was ready to delete my account and become a monk. A life of solitude, prayer, and contemplation sounded pretty good. I did enjoy the Gregorian chants my dad used to listen to while reading before bed, though it felt like one of us was about to be sacrificed. Perhaps I’d apply to a monastery, use Richard as a reference. Maybe he could sell his T-shirts out front from nine to noon. Anything was better than being reminded my life was an unappealing failure no one wanted to sample. Dive right in, folks, there’s plenty for seconds.

  What stopped me was Richard’s words: “Let the girl make up her own mind.” Not to mention his, and my mother’s, advice not to borrow trouble. My own personal motto was Hope for the best, expect the worst. However, this generally locked the door before even attempting to open it. If I assumed disaster was imminent, why proceed? I needed to pry my mind ajar to the possibility that maybe something good would result from taking a chance. Just do it, I finally ordered myself. It has to work because normally I’d never try this.

  After crawling through pages of profiles, I came across my moment for boldness. She stood out from the others by saying less. Her name was Leslie, she was six and a half years younger than I and lived in Memphis. She posted only one picture (beautiful), but what really grabbed me was she wrote that she wanted to find someone who’d put her second. “Second?” I asked out loud, hoping she’d hear me and explain. She did. She wrote she needed to be second after God. She wanted a guy who was so close to the Lord that everyone else, including his sweetheart, had to wait in line because there wasn’t any room at the front for others.

  That was different. She didn’t strike me as the type who took a lot of selfies.

  I was intrigued. More than that. I wanted to contact her right away before some sleazy Satanist slithered in pretending to love Jesus. Nobody loved the Big Guy more than me! You best back off, I warned the computer screen.

  I had to act. Someone like Leslie wasn’t going to stay on the market long. I could see from her profile that she’d joined the site roughly when I did, so it was only a matter of
time before smoothies deluged her with winks and smiles. Back off, I threatened once more.

  Much handwringing followed over which approach was appropriate, forward, or just plain cheesy. I ruled out a wink pretty quickly because she didn’t seem like the sort of girl who’d respond favorably to it in an introduction. I strongly considered sending her only a smile and letting it breathe. Hands off the wheel, no overdoing it, let her come to me. Play it cool, brother, I encouraged myself, nodding confidently. Except…I wasn’t cool, or a big fan of ambiguity, and a little yellow smiley face left a lot of room for interpretation. Was it really wise to bank my entire romantic future on an emoticon?

  I decided I needed to write a few words to give her a sense of who I was and why I was contacting her. If I really wanted to start corresponding with her regularly, I had to take more of a shot than a smile. If she didn’t respond, at least I’d know I’d gone down swinging.

  Transparency and straightforwardness seemed most effective to avoid misinterpretation, so I wrote the following: I appreciate what you said about wanting to be second after God. I agree with that. Then I yelled for Bryan to race down the hall to my room to yank the computer away before I drowned Leslie in two pages of exposition about my spiritual journey, theological stances, and philosophies of apologetics. Once he had a firm grip, I said, “Wait. One thing.”

  I reached over, paused for a moment, and hit Send.

  It was out of my hands now. I had to sit and wait to see what Leslie said, if she responded at all. She undoubtedly received many messages from admirers, all of them angling for the chance to woo her. I was merely the last in line. I doubted she’d see me way back here.

  And she didn’t. A week passed with no response. I checked the site for messages fifteen to twenty times a day. Nothing, not even from other girls surfing for potential beaus. I felt like a homeless man living under a bridge. They could smell my stench through the connection. I should’ve written my profile on a cardboard sign.

  Then one night while eating a chocolate pudding cup and contemplating working on a cruise ship (it’d looked like they were having so much fun on The Love Boat when I was a kid), I got a message from Leslie. I was terrified to click on it to learn my fate. I assumed it said something like, Sorry, I just got engaged, or, You really smell—take a bath. I reminded myself that a promising fallback career in the cruise industry had recently developed should things unravel in the next few moments. With my hand shaking slightly, I clicked on Leslie’s message.

  It read, It’s nice to hear you say that. Have a good day. And then she added a smiley face.

  A smile! Not a mere thumbs-up like we’d just concluded business, but a smiley face. I stared at that gorgeous, bald, yellow head beaming its pearly whites at me. True, it wasn’t a wink, yet we didn’t want to rush things. There was no hurry. We had plenty of time for heavy stuff like winks. For now, this was plenty.

  I did wonder why it had taken her a week to write me back, yet I figured she’d just been busy. I tried not to overanalyze it, though that wasn’t easy for me. It wasn’t until later that Leslie confessed she hadn’t written me back because she’d thrown me in the trash, literally. She’d deleted my message, uninterested in corresponding with the smelly homeless man. But for some reason, she’d later gone back through her Trash folder and dug out my note for a second look. Despite her confusion over me accidentally listing my ethnicity as Asian American, she changed her mind and decided I was worth a try. I was glad she did. It would’ve been agonizing choosing between the monastery and a cruise ship.

  Chapter Ten

  Adventures in Knitting

  That fall semester, Bryan was rejected for his practicum. His master of arts in marriage and family counseling required successful completion of practicum to graduate. Practicum lasted two years, beginning with group work with fellow counseling students and their professor during which they learned to share openly. Later, students counseled clients while wearing earpieces so their professor could advise them during sessions. Students then counseled at other centers in the area while still being monitored, before finally getting to counsel unsupervised and reporting their work to their professor. The initial group work and sessions were held at the seminary’s counseling center one night a week with a variety of clients from the community who received a discounted rate because of meeting with students.

  Bryan had waited on pins and needles for months to learn if he was accepted, but now that he wasn’t, he had to reapply for admission into next school year’s practicum. If he was rejected for that, there was a chance he could get dropped from his program or “encouraged to explore other avenues of study,” as one faculty member had put it to him.

  These were dark days. The world had just bucked completely off its axis and been blindsided by the meteor from Armageddon. Bryan kept his bedroom door locked most nights. When I knocked to see if he wanted to order a pizza and watch a movie, his favorite pastime, he merely mumbled, “I’m going to sleep.” I sweetened the pot with bonus enticements like chocolate chip cookies and bottles of Coke (he swore it tasted better in bottles) with no luck. He slept most of the day, even at his part-time job with the physical plant. His chief responsibility was to drive around in one of their work trucks replacing air filters in all of the buildings across campus, including student housing, and every so often he parked at the very back of campus to take a nap in the truck. His motivation vanished. He stopped keeping up with his studies and practicing guitar. He let it all slide.

  And why not? Without practicum, he couldn’t complete his degree and counsel as a professional. His dream to open a home for troubled children was lost. His reason for going back to graduate school had just been ripped away. In that one letter, his future closed.

  When the letter from school regarding practicum had arrived, I’d stood in his room as he opened it ready to applaud or to console him. The letter didn’t mention why he’d been turned down for a spot in practicum, merely that he needed to reapply for completion of the program. Nice of them to remind him.

  But we knew why they’d done it.

  Bryan was different from his classmates—from the rest of the student body. His checkered past and arrests certainly made him unique at the conservative seminary, though there were others who’d made mistakes they were now overcoming. No one was spotless, no matter how hard they prayed or how often they read scripture. It was still a fallen world choked with sinners, and Bryan was no different in that regard. His sins were simply louder.

  What set him apart was his emotional instability. At the time, he’d been diagnosed as bipolar, though he later learned he actually wasn’t. His depression, anxieties, and mood swings seemed to point to bipolar disorder, yet he never had manic episodes. Regardless, the seminary had never dealt with a student with his condition, which was hard to believe, but that was the prevailing sense Bryan got within his program. He was an anomaly. Worse—a loose cannon. Basically, they worried he might get into practicum and flip out during a counseling session with a client. With his condition, they weren’t sure he could handle the stress and trauma he’d have to deal with on a weekly basis. They thought it might overwhelm him. They didn’t know. This was unchartered territory for them, so they thought the best thing to do was to slow the process to give Bryan another year to prepare and to prove he could stay in school doing well without setbacks.

  I also believed they were testing him to see how he coped with the disappointment of not being accepted into practicum, though that was merely a theory I didn’t share with Bryan. Perhaps they secretly hoped he’d flame out over the rejection and quit school, sparing them the headache of wrestling with his reapplication. After two weeks with his bedroom door locked at night, I thought they might get their wish.

  During the rare moments Bryan slunk into the bathroom, I tried to straighten up his bed and stack his books to curb the chaos. I thought his messy, disorganized room contributed to his d
isorderly life. It wasn’t the sole cause, but it sure didn’t help. I had a feeling he looked at his clutter and thought, I can’t even keep my room clean. I stink at everything.

  However, trying to tidy up Bryan’s room in the ten minutes he was in the bathroom was like sweeping the Sahara. His mess had gone viral. Heaps of clothes, magazines, books, papers, notebooks, backpacks, pens, Coke bottles, empty bags of chips, and beaten-up shoes smothered every square inch of space. Some piles were three or four feet deep. It was like trudging through snowdrifts. The one sliver of daylight sat directly in front of his computer, though he must’ve parachuted over there because the dense jungle offered no paths. It would’ve been simpler to torch it all and start from scratch, but Bryan was a hoarder (obviously) who couldn’t discard anything. His possessions were the only thing he felt he controlled. They were his and nobody could say otherwise. He couldn’t sabotage them. He couldn’t screw them up. It reminded me of the way Richard acted with hiring and firing employees. That was the one area where he got to be completely in charge, where no one else could step in and tell him what to do. Bryan’s mountainous mess was just that: his. It wasn’t pretty, yet if it helped him keep going, I was all for it. I waded out of his room and shut the door.

  During the practicum fallout, Bryan didn’t even want to play tennis anymore. Besides movies, computers, and rock climbing, one of the only other hobbies Bryan enjoyed was playing tennis. He’d played in high school, and his doubles partner, Todd, lived in Fort Worth. When Bryan started back at seminary, the three of us began meeting every Friday evening to play tennis and pray together.