Spants

The new CD player arrived Monday morning.  Josh didn’t get home until after 9pm, and he ended up spending a lot of time installing it.  The kit that came with this one was a pain in the ass and required all this extra work.  He had to get his Dremel-like drill out to saw off these plastic pieces.  And of course, connecting all those wires is a menial task.  I told him it could wait, but he did it anyway.

When he’d done all he could inside the house, we went outside together to plug everything in and put the dash together.  Basically, I hold the flashlight while Josh connects ports and tucks wires and pushes the dash back together.

It was exciting when my newer Shuffle worked from the Auxiliary port and when his old, 1st generation Shuffle worked through the USB port.  If mine hadn’t worked, he was going to find me a Shuffle like his so I could use it in the car.  I thought that part unnecessary since I could just use SD cards, but it just seemed like one of those things that men want to do sometimes in order to “make things right.”  Do you know what I’m saying?  Things would’ve been off-kilter and unfair somehow if my iPod hadn’t worked and his did.  Fortunately, both Shuffles worked, and that’s that.

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I think I said it the other day, and I know I’ve said it before: fall makes me nostalgic.  Even where no real memory exists.  Sure, Josh and I knew each other for a blip of a moment in high school.  There were no “moments,” though.  At least, there were none for me.  It’s so weird how the mind behaves.  You’re sitting there doing something, completely in the moment.  Suddenly, your brain is creating all this back-story.  Or you start feeling a way you haven’t felt in years.  And you take your present (and your future) into the past with you.  I don’t understand this, but I like it.  I hope I always experience it.

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While we were sitting in the car it started raining.  We were listening to music, sitting in front of the house in the idling car with the rain coming down, pinging the poorly-insulated car roof.  It felt like we were teenagers who had stayed out just a bit too late.  And that if the right song came on, Josh was going to lean over and kiss me.  And there would be quick breathing, lips pushing and probing, and tiny groans of satisfaction with promises to call tomorrow.  I would run up the stairs yard to my Grandma’s porch and wave to him when I got to the door.  Then I would go inside with perma-grin on my face and idealize everything that had just happened, still tasting his mouth in mine, locking it all into my memory forever.

Instead, he turned the car off and we walked upstairs together.