Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Eighteen

Eighteen was an age of awe for me. I'm not sure whether I am trying to say that it was full of awe or awful, but it was something. It was a time when I was plenty hormonal and boy-crazy like any teenager, but I suddenly had developed the confidence to actually talk to boys (something I lacked at age 16 when I was only hormonal but never could so much as utter a "hey" in the hallway to a cute boy).
So at age eighteen I was a sophomore in college and decided to visit my sister for Christmas break. My sister happened to live only a mile away from where one of my best college friends' family lived. She also was home for the holidays so it was fun to be close by.
On New Year's Eve my sister told me that there was a single's dance at the church. I called Eileen and we arranged to go together. We got all dressed up with hair and make-up perfect--as any 18 year old girl does when she thinks there might be a chance she will be meeting the man of her dreams. I'm sure I straightened my hair--to make my completely stick straight hair even more stick straight (as if that's possible). I probably wore the same skirt/shirt combo Eileen had helped me pick out a few months earlier when I was trying to make some boy jealous. You get the point--we were typical 18 year olds.
It was about a 40 minute drive to the dance, and I'm sure that we were giggling excitedly the whole way. We skipped on into  the dance full of confidence--ready to live it up (and meet guys).

The moment we walked in, however, our emotions drastically changed. 
First we were confused.
"Hey, uh, Miriam," Eileen was speaking slowly and steadily yet I could sense the fear in her voice as we were looking around, "I think there's something wrong."
"You're right," I muttered as our confusion changed to complete panic.
"RUN!" I heard Eileen whisper frantically as we both realized that we weren't at a young single's dance, we were at an old singles' dance. These guys were like over 30 years old--if you can believe that.

We made it to the car, breathless, yet safe. My sister had almost messed up our confident, boy-crazy, eighteen year old lives.

We decided to take a break from our usual boy-crazy lives and we spent the evening on the couch looking at pictures of Eileen's study abroad.
We'd have to resume boy-craziness the next day--hopefully we'd be able to do that mistake free.

No comments:

Post a Comment