Five.
Five years ago tonight, some guy and I hung out in a bar booth until about midnight and I didn't stop smiling for the whole thirty miles home. To celebrate, here's a little excerpt from my (definitely still needs lots of revising so don't judge too much) memoir manuscript.
Sean and I drove the half-mile from his house to Davidson’s athletics center where his office was located, along with the basketball arena. On any given winter Saturday night, this place would be hopping in the lead-up to a Wildcat basketball game, the hum of voices mixing with the buzz of brass from the pep band and the squeak of shoes on the court. If I could, I would have bottled the smell of those nights: rubber, chlorine, polished wood, popcorn, a warm and heady mixture that spoke safety to my bones.
Since I couldn’t bottle it, I kept coming back. Davidson basketball games, though not technically a world religion, came as close to Glenn Church in North Carolina as I could get. There was something about the tiny, closely packed arena filled with faces and memories that grew more familiar with each passing year. “When the ball drops, this is church,” a friend wrote of it once, and he became a pastor, so he should know. As a student, a basketball game was my favorite place to be. When I stayed nearby after graduation, I realized this was a part of Davidson where I would always feel welcome.
Today, in late July, the athletics center lobby was dark and empty. We let ourselves in by a side door with Sean’s massive set of keys, and I savored the silence, so different from those winter nights, though I could still feel the remnants of buzz and brass pulsing in my ears.
He and I had met right outside his office after one of those basketball games in my first year out of school, about three weeks before he walked into the town bar and sat down in my booth. I was part of the stream of people about to burst into the chilled February air when a friend pulled me out of line. “Claire, do you know Sean Lennox?”
I knew that I had heard his name before, and I recognized his face, but had never put the two together. This was a common occurrence on such a small campus, where everybody seemed to have heard of everyone else. He grasped my hand firmly with a broad smile. I don’t recall him speaking at all.
“Hi, nice to meet you!” I said with a blithe smile. Then I left.
Three years and six months later, Sean unlocked the blue door in the corner of the lobby, squeezed between a refrigerator and a drink machine. The lights revealed two desks belonging to Sean and his boss. The white walls were covered with posters from old sports seasons. The floor was strewn with countless boxes of brochures, media guides, and expired tickets. Every part of this room was familiar to me, from the physical remnants to the memories.
We had talked briefly in this office two days after our unexpected long evening at the bar. The building was beginning to amp up for a game. I slipped in through the blue door to say hello, and Sean smiled that up-to-his-eyes smile that I hadn’t been able to forget.
“Want some King Cake?” he asked me, gesturing to a colorful box. His aunt sent one from New Orleans every year for Mardi Gras, he explained, and it was always a hit with his coworkers. I chewed the sugary clumps of glaze and tried to carry on a smart conversation. “What are you doing before the game?” he asked as I wiped my sticky fingers on my jeans.
“Going to see my friend for a little while; she’s a sophomore,” I said.
“Cool. And what are you doing aft–…” Just as my heart began to flutter, his slow solid voice trailed off and his eyes flickered to someone behind me. “Hi, can I help you?”
He returned to his game day duties and I backed out of the office, beaming.
Two of our friends had offered their gifts of calligraphy and drawing to make our wedding invitations one-of-a-kind. In Sean’s office, we took the final versions, printed on cream-colored paper, and began cutting and gluing each one to red cardstock as a backing. At one end of the table, he measured and cut, while I pasted and pressed at the other.
Except for the office lights, the athletics center was dark and cool and silent in the way that only a small college campus can be in the summertime, like a secret. I loved being able to still hold parts of this place, to have chances to exist within it in new ways, thanks to Sean. Both of us were quiet as we cut and glued the words to our shared future in this space that knew both of us.
The only interruption today came in the form of Doodle. Doodle, an older townsperson, helped oversee and maintain the facilities no matter the season. If you were any kind of regular at the athletics center, you quickly came to know Doodle and his floppy white mustache. Today he shuffled in with his vacuum cleaner, nodded and smiled at Sean, greeted me with a slightly premature “Hey, Mrs. Lennox,” and shuffled out again.
Doodle would be here on frosty Tuesday mornings in college when I arrived outside of this building at 6:30 a.m. and joined the line to pick up game tickets. We weren’t allowed to wait inside (Doodle would crack the door open to take a furtive look at us, then close it again) so I’d bundle up and plop down on the cold concrete, often with an English paper draft to edit. In the days when the legend of my classmate Stephen Curry had begun to build, the line would snake around the edge of the building and down towards the fraternity houses. Senior year, after Steph had left for the NBA, the number of early risers dropped considerably. I could have picked up a ticket much later, but couldn’t shake the habit of being one of the first in line.
Thankfully, I had a friend who was just as devoted. She would meet me outside with her pink Snuggie in tow. We would each plunge an arm into the fleece, our breaths slapping the air with white steam as we talked. We tended to land smack in the middle of a group of football frat guys who made it their goal to always be at the front of the line.
At 7:00 a.m., the director of ticketing would appear and prop the door open. The football players whooped and stampeded inside. We stuffed the Snuggie into a backpack and scurried into the thick warm air. We slogged over to the folding table that had been set up on the dingy carpet where bleary-eyed athletics department staff members sat in front of piles of tickets.
“Endzone, please,” I’d say automatically as I approached the ticket table. The man in the baseball cap picked one up from the pile on the left and handed it to me. I folded it once and tucked it into my right pocket.
When I thought about moments like that – of which there had been how many? –
I wanted to freeze it, walk around the table, bend down and look into the bleary, early morning eyes of the man in the baseball cap. What would I have seen there – any sign that a future husband awaited me? If he had looked at me, what would he have seen? How had our eyes, our hearts, the way we looked at each other, shifted and transformed over these years to arrive at this new moment that I wanted to freeze? The moment in which the same man, wearing no baseball cap and much more alert vision, on a sweaty Saturday afternoon in July, carefully trimmed the edges of our wedding invitations.
