Don't Let The Past Remind Us Of What We Are Not Now (eBook)

Chapter 1

When he turned forty in 1988, Brian Sparks began running. By 1990, he had run two marathons. When he turned fifty, he added strength training to his regimen. He did it because he refused to give in to middle age.

Brian was a baby boomer. A quintessential baby boomer, born late in 1947, the most representative year for baby boomers. So here he was in the spring of 1998, having turned fifty a few months earlier, and he was running. He wasn’t a fast runner. Too big for that at 6’3” and two hundred pounds. But he was a hard runner with endurance. He was pretty good at every sport he ever tried and he had tried nearly all of them. He was more than pretty good at several sports, including baseball, tennis, and volleyball.

He was in great physical shape and with his dark medium-length hair and dark mustache, he was an attractive man, who looked much younger than his age.

On this day, Friday, March 6, he was finishing a five-mile run on the gut-wrenching hills of Indiana University. He was in Bloomington for four days of training for his job as a director of a social service agency. Tomorrow, Saturday, would just be half a day and he would be finished with his training. He had to attend these training sessions periodically and he loved being in Bloomington, where he had spent four of the happiest years of his life as an undergraduate. But he didn’t like sleeping in a strange bed alone. He missed his wife, Beth, and his ten-year-old daughter, Wendy.

Bloomington always brought back wonderful memories. Brian was a nostalgic man who believed that the best time in the history of the world was when he was growing up. And no other years could have been as meaningful or as much fun as the years he attended college, 1965 to 1970.

Being in Bloomington made him feel good and also nostalgic. But it also slapped him in the face with the awful truth that you can’t go home again. Once he had been part of the pulse of this wonderful campus, but now he was just a visitor.

Brian finished his run in the parking lot of his hotel, the Holiday Inn, and took the steps up to his room on the second floor. He showered and dressed and then lay down on his bed to try to figure out how he was going to occupy himself for the evening.

He finally decided to walk back to campus. He left his room, went down the stairs and out the side entrance. In a few minutes, he was making his way up Indiana Avenue. He crossed over at Seventh Street and entered the womb. That was how the university felt to him when he was a student there. A womb, insulated and safe from the real world, during the turbulent years of the late 1960s. It was good then to be a college student.

It was dusk as he strolled around the campus. The thought occurred to him that although a lot of things had changed, many things were still the same as they were when he was a student here. The campus had grown, expanded, and there were several new buildings. But the core was still the same.

The Indiana Memorial Student Union was the largest student union in the world. The library was the largest library on a college campus in the world. Then there were the woods, the paths, the architecture, and the Jordan River. The Jordan River was really only a small brook that snaked its way through the campus.

His alma mater, Indiana University, was, in his mind, the most beautiful campus in America. Of course, he hadn’t seen them all, but he had been to UC Berkeley, Arizona State, the University of Wisconsin, and Hanover. They all had beautiful campuses, but they couldn’t match this one.

As night began to fall, Brian wandered down to Kirkwood Avenue, the lively street on the edge of campus, which was like an extension of the university. Man, the wonderful times he had spent here nearly thirty years ago. The memories were so vivid to him.

Brian decided to stop in at Nick’s English Hut for a beer and a stromboli, just for old time’s sake. As he turned to enter Nick’s, and just as he put his hand on the door, he noticed out of the corner of his eye a beautiful and exotic-looking woman leaning against the facade of the pub. The sight of her took his breath away. She had long, dark, wavy hair, was slender yet voluptuous, and was dressed in a black dress, sandals, gold hoop earrings, and a multi-colored beaded necklace. She seemed out of place. Brian couldn’t help thinking that she looked like she belonged there on the street thirty years ago in 1968; not here in 1998.

Brian entered Nick’s and found it was crowded with a combination of late happy hour and early supper patrons. He decided to try to find a table upstairs, where it would be less crowded and quieter. As he moved through the crowd toward the stairs, he couldn’t get the woman he had seen outside out of his mind. She looked so beautiful and so out of place.

At the last table just before the stairs, he discovered three of the women and two of the men from his training class conversing around a couple of pitchers of beer. They invited him to join them, but he declined because two of them were smoking and he found that offensive. He used the excuse that he thought it would be too crowded in the booth.

Brian made his way up the stairs and into the back room where he found a nice, quiet corner table. As he pulled out a chair to have a seat, he noticed there was only one other person in the room with him, sitting in a booth to his right. He sat down as the waitress arrived. He quickly perused the menu, but he already knew what he wanted. He ordered a stromboli and Bud Ice draught.

Once the waitress was gone, Brian looked up at the wall-mounted TV, where SportsCenter was in progress. Then he glanced over to the occupied booth where, to his amazement, sat the lovely woman he had seen outside Nick’s as he entered. Again the sight of her took his breath away.

He was puzzled. How could she be there? She couldn’t have passed him and gotten to her booth before he got to his table. Sure, he had stopped for a moment to talk to his classmates downstairs, but nobody had passed him and gone up the stairs ahead of him. It made no sense. Having a logical mind, Brian could not figure out her being in that booth when he arrived at his table. It just gave him more to think about since he hadn’t stopped thinking about her after he saw her outside.

Brian’s beer and sandwich arrived and while he worked on those, he watched ESPN, but he wasn’t paying much attention to the TV because he was thinking about the mysterious dark-haired beauty just 20 feet away from him. Every time he glanced over at her it seemed that she was looking at him. Once, he thought, she smiled at him. After his third beer, he was sure that she was returning his gaze.

Several times he considered getting up and going over to her booth. Once he even stood up, but he just stretched and sat back down. He was a happily married man. He had no business showing interest in this woman.

He turned back toward the TV and took a drink of his beer. As he set the beer down, he noticed she was there, standing beside his table. For the third time in less than an hour, she took his breath away.

She smiled and reached out her hand to take his. He stood as if hypnotized and she led him back to her booth. When they were seated across from each other, she said, “My name is Tess.”

“I’m Brian.”

“Hello Brian.” Her bright green eyes sparkled.

Brian had an excited, sensual, fanciful feeling as he sat there. Tess offered him some brandy from a bottle in front of her. Then he noticed there was an empty glass sitting in front of him, as if she were expecting someone—him. He was mesmerized by the depth of her green eyes.

“Thanks, but I probably shouldn’t be drinking brandy on top of the three beers I’ve had.”

“Why?”

“It might make me sick.”

“It won’t, I promise.”

This woman could have told him that the sun circles the earth. She could have said it snows at the equator and daisies bloom at the North Pole and Brian would have been powerless to disagree. Tess hadn’t even begun to test Brian’s grasp of reality, but that would come. She poured some brandy into his glass and they both drank.

Brian began to feel as though the two of them were in their own little world. No one else had come upstairs since they arrived. Even the waitress had quit coming around, which he thought was strange.

It seemed like Tess was pouring brandy from a bottomless bottle. Brian was feeling very high. The brandy had a lot to do with it, but it was more than the alcohol. Everything around him began to feel surreal. His senses were filled to overflowing.

“I’m a little confused. Well, actually, I’m a lot confused. I’m sure I saw you outside on the sidewalk when I came in, and yet, magically you were here in this booth when I sat down over there.”

“Magically? That’s an interesting choice of words. At one time or another, each of us does something magical. My father used to sing to me, ‘Do you believe in magic in a young girl’s heart?’”

Tess poured them some more brandy and then asked, “Why are you in Bloomington?”

Brian wondered...