My Dinner With Gordon
 
I suppose I should rejoice that we are now so "familiar" with each other that he can point out to me that I have something in my teeth, and he can ask me to tell him "the moment [his] hair no longer looks good." I decided to be intentional about having a good time with him on Friday. No matter what preconceptions I had, I decided not to miss the point of the evening, whatever it was. So, I got all zen about it.
 
We sat in a booth that was a bit uncomfortable for me given that it seemed to have been designed with two heroin chic people in mind. Gordon, being slender, had no trouble. I didn't have "trouble," per se. It just wasn't effortless. It was not a secret that something bigger would have accomodated me better. So, I said to myself 'Kate, he can see you. He knows you're not a small person. Sliding into this booth gracelessly wasn't his first tip off.'
 
About two hours before he came to get me, I found myself becoming cripplingly sleepy, so I ate a donut and drank some sweet coffee to wake up. Eating the cake-like treat curbed my appetite, so I hardly ate anything at the restaurant. Gordon, however, was ravenous. I had never seen him wolf down food that way. Quasi-barbaric, but endearing.
 
This was hanging out, in every sense of the word. He chatted animatedly about his week, how he'd been something of a slacker, but hadn't meant to be. I told him that it seemed to me that all of his choices over the course of the last few days had taken him by surprise, and that perhaps making active decisions before he found himself in a moment would allow him more control over the passing of time... that he might get more done. I was playing the Wendy to his Peter Pan.
 
Okay, so whenever he asks about the novel I get non-committal. Gordon respects my poetry so much that he used to carry it around with him wherever he went. I can't let him read the romance novel, which is based on my own life, to some extent. But also, I can't tell him my nom de plume and the title of this pap, and trust that it won't tarnish his image of me as a literary lion. His respect of my art is the most defined thing about our relationship. I don't need that eclipsed by a project I've undertaken on a lark.
 
After dinner we drove around Marble and Resevoir Hills because he wanted to show me the architechtural features of some of the homes there. He told me he knows one thing for sure, and that is that he wants out of Baltimore. Gordon has wanted to leave this town since I've known him, and it keeps not happening for various and sundry reasons that I've always attributed to divine providence. I wonder why Baltimore won't let him go. He looked at me once when we were waiting at a red light and said "Don't you ever get sick of this place?" I kept staring ahead, and told him that I came back to Baltimore because it's where I wanted to be. He shook his head, mildly incredulous that anyone could feel that way.
 
At one point when we were approaching the mouth of I-83, he lamented how many times he'd been on that road, how he knew every bump... how annoying it was.
 
"So, you want to live someplace where you don't know the bumps in the road?"
"Yeah... No, not really..."
"It must be so painful for you to live inside your own head where everything is an immediate contradiction."
"Exactly!"
 
And there you have it. Finding no easy place to park around my neighborhood, we made the mutual, but unspoken decision that he would not come in afterall. And that was okay with me, because I wanted to be alone to think. In some ways it would have been nice if he had been there when I opened my award letter... he would have been the first to know. The cookie didn't crumble that way, though, so I shared my news with my sister, who's alone this week while my mom cavorts in Reno with Jim.