1987

My life was starting to unravel...or more truthful: it had completely unravelled and I was scraping bottom, but my bar was so low that I didn't see how far down I had gone until my only option was to move far away and to be with the one nurturing person I knew. I sometimes romanticize this period of my life and there were some soaring moments, but underneath it was the beginning of the end of a 16 year jag of what I thought was the true meaning of "fun."

I had graduated college in 83 and moved to NYC the next day. The year and a half in NY has been written about previously on this blog, and it is a harrowing report - I'm just really glad I survived it. I had a caring boyfriend during that time, and that is always what has gotten me through my life until I turned 50 - from the age of 17 I always had a loving, nurturing boyfriend as a web of support that I didn't realize I had until now that I have been single for years. Because of the support I didn't have from family, I needed it badly to help me get through life and it usually showed up as a devoted boyfriend. So thankful to have had that...

So summer of 1987 became increasingly bleak...I had broken up with my boy scout boyfriend for a guy who buzzed by me on a skateboard while I was getting drunk in the afternoon at Les Amis cafe in Austin. I saw this beautiful boy and decided to gamble everything, so dumped K. the next morning over the telephone and went over to Skatbeoy's house for very awkward hang out with no connection or simpatico. K was devastated and his mother was dying of cancer and I spiraled down into wasterville, stopped going to my job, stopped seeing the skate boy, and met another man who would be my rock for the next couple of years...but I had to run away as that seems to be built into my DNA as how I escape escalating problems I didn't know how to deal with.

So I packed up everything I owned in my Hondamatic Civic (looked like a helmet on wheels) and drove to Omaha NE to be with a friend who I bonded with in a fierce way on a summer trip to Ireland in 1984. We met through a mutual friend and both fell in love with boys on the Dingle Peninsula and had the most magical and romantic (and drunken) 6 weeks ever. I went back to NYC where I was living and she went back to Houston where she was in college (but her home was Nebraska). We NEVER stopped talking and writing and dreaming about going back to Ireland. Not necessarily to be with those boys but we LOVED Ireland and made a serious plan to move there. I moved back to Austin in 85 and she moved back to Omaha a year or so later. By 87 my life was going nowhere and I had a boyfriend that I as in love with but felt I HAD to take this chance to follow a really big dream. The sweet guy I had dumped earlier that year drove with me as far as Topeka KS and then I headed to Omaha on my own....looking at a paper map and Julie's hand written instructions from a letter. I pulled up into the old craftsman house's driveway and we gleefully reconnected. We went downtown and drank in the Irish bars and I loved the old brick streeted downtown.

I don't know how long I lived in Omaha but it was only a few months...a giddy, vodka soaked few months of singing Irish songs and driving downtown to pubs and working the worst jobs at call centers, merry maids, etc. J was serious about moving to Ireland and she did it - I was a coward and moved back to Austin to be with my guy. I never forgot about my cowardice and giving up on a dream so avowed to myself that I would not ever do that again. It took 17 years but I got a bigger and better dream and went for it. Loyal readers have read reams about that!

Even though the move to Nebraska was brought about by spiraling downward circumstances, that few months of 1987 remains one of my fondest times. I don't know if I have a long post about Nebraska, but I'll rifle through these blogs and see if there is one. Criminals I just did an extremely satisfying post about one special day in 1984 when I lived in Rego Park Queens. Nebraska deserves a novella.