Nobody has flirted with me at a bar or anywhere else in about a brazillion years. I guess it takes the presence of Sam the Archaeologist to make it happen. Or maybe the guy was just attracted to our iPhones. He was a big, brash old coot. The whole experience was a blast from the past. Because boy oh boy, thirty years or so ago, we spent a lot of time hanging around bars wondering what we were going to do with our lives. At least, that’s what I was wondering. I think Sam may have actually had some plans. We always managed to attract boys. Unfortunately, we had a knack for attracting some pretty weird boys. We would usually toy with them for a while with various little bits of shtik that we developed along the way. Like when someone would ask us that lame old question “what’r’ya into?” We’d exchange a glance. Sam would counter with “I clean human toe bones” and I’d say, “I vibrate columns of air.”

One of the best was the DNA guy. We were at the DelMar Bar up in Sault Ste. Siberia one June. We didn’t usually go to the DelMar but nobody we knew was around and we were bored so we decided to try a different place. There was a noisy group of Canadian steelworkers there including one particularly loud neanderthal who was so high he was swinging from the chandeliers in his lumberjack clothing. We weren’t interested in talking to him or anyone else in there, so we sat at our own table and tried to have our own private conversation.

It gets a little complicated for a just a bit here so bear with me. A story within a story. Our conversation was about an incident at the Alpha Bar that had happened the Christmas before. One of the local college basketball boys became totally enamored of my cousin and was trying desperately to pry her away from an animated conversation she was having with some others by repeatedly asking her, “What are you talking about?” She finally got fed up, turned around, looked him in the eye and said, “recombinant DNA!” Having never heard of recombinant DNA, he pretty promptly slunk off to lick his wounds in whatever corner he had come out of. My cousin was not one of those twitty little bottle-blonde groupies he was accustomed to, that’s for sure.

Anyway, there we were at the DelMar about six months later and we were talking about that incident when the neanderthal in the lumberjack outfit tripped over my chair. And then he tripped over it again. And a third time! Finally, to our horror, he dragged a chair over to our table and sat down. Wouldn’t you know, the first words out of his mouth were, “What are you talking about?” We looked at each other in utter amazement and said in unison, “DNA.” “What?” he asked. “DNA!” we said again. “What?” he asked *again*. Incredulously, emphatically, and in unison, we replied, “Deoxyribonucleic acid!” “Oh, I haven’t done any of *that* in a while!” was his reply. “It’s getting pretty expensive, isn’t it?”

After we got over our shock, we managed to get rid of him and somehow we lived through our early twenties. It wasn’t my favorite time of life. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and I was between boyfriends for just a little bit too long for my taste. I know how stupid that last bit sounds, but at that stage of the game, I didn’t particularly like to be alone. I wanted someone to share my life with. I wanted to have children someday. I wasn’t ready then and I knew it. I guess I wanted to *know* it would happen someday. With the long string of wimps, weirdohs, losers, and clingers that I kept running into, I didn’t have much hope. And no, I didn’t meet them *all* in bars. I didn’t understand why it seemed so easy for everyone else to meet boys that they liked *and* that liked them back. Those few that passed the ick factor for me always seemed unattainable. Already taken or not interested in *me* or moving to Timbuctoo.

I don’t really want to dwell on those days. Somewhere along the line, I ran into the GG and then somebody hit the fast forward button and that era is long gone. There were plenty of good times and Sam and all of our adventures together helped me get through it all. When that old coot started flirting with us last night, it brought back all those old times. Doc Burns took the loverly pic of me that’s on this page. If you click on it, you can see a few more pictures, some of them taken by our buddy (with my iPhone!) and a couple by yours truly.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.