Music from an Amazing Duo

I never thought I would want to revisit those days. Emotionally, I mean. It was a period of supreme suckage - my time at Ye Old Holiness Institution. But seeing the duo again was wonderful. It is amazing the way time has reframed our experiences there and now hazes them over with just humor and an eyeroll.

Neither of them has changed really. I haven't. But we are all very different than we were in the era of shoulder pads the size of sawhorses and parachute pants with an infinite number of zippered slashes. We are more ourselves. I think we're better.

When you grow up in the hothouse of sanctification and psychospiritual waterboarding that is the Nazirenes, you either break it, or it breaks you. It could have. It didn't. Olivet was like being sent into combat with men you don't know and emerging sisters. The family is hellaciously dysfunctional but nonetheless maladaptively bonded. Your choice is to make comrades or suicide notes. Comrades is definitely the preferred course.

I can't believe that it has been a quarter of a century since our last meeting. It was like a New Year's Eve at the VFW where you run into a foxhole buddy from 'Nam that you haven't seen since you were defoliated, yet can pick up where you left off. It isn't long until the sweetness of your youthful time together washes over you and softens the most painful of memories.

And it wasn't long before we were beyond reminiscing and were on to dishing on tiny secrets kept for the last couple of decades: confirmations of furtive, late-night gropings in dorm rooms; tales of lusts past and youthful indesretions; and gossipy speculations about this boy or that- now men as old and probably jaded as we.

I loved it. The trip made a final piece of coming out sort of snap into place. Or perhaps more accurately, it was the slight turn of the dial that brought brought focus to the times seen now only through the lens of hindsight.

Either way, reconnecting with the duo was unexpectedly wonderful. Oh. And it wasn't THAT duo.