When I started college the fall of 1988, I met a new group of friends. Chris sat with me in 2 of my classes and we became better friends, giggling about boys and hanging out. One afternoon, I went with her to her friend's dorm room. There I met Greg, the 2 Mike's, Todd, and Jim. The room belonged to Jim and Todd, they smoked so much that when you opened the door, the fire alarm would go off.
I played D&D with the guys, Chris had us going to football games to watch her do her marching baton thing and Greg played in the band. We had a lot of fun together, the guys had this old couch set up under their loft and a tv set up with an Atari system. We'd skip classes together and hang out during exam nights, cramming like crazy just to fail them the next day. All but one of us ended up getting kicked out of college our freshman year due to bad grades.
I kept in touch with Chris over the next summer and when I moved to Whitewater to live with a friend and work in the next town over, we would hang out on the weekends. Jim lived a few towns away and would come down for movie marathons and hang outs, we became better friends that summer. Towards the end of the summer, I had met a guy at a concert and we started dating. I had moved back home for a month before deciding to follow him to Madison where he had transferred for his sophomore year of school.
Living in Madison was amazing, I worked two jobs and had discovered the joys of drinking and partying. Breaking up with Frank wasn't a big deal to me, he was a few years younger and couldn't go to the clubs with me as I was legal and he wasn't. To him, it was different and there were a few months where I'd find him watching me while I was walking to work or he'd suddenly be there when I was closing after bar rush. It got scary so I did what every normal girl would do, I ran back home.
To shorten this... I moved to Idaho to escape life, lived with relatives there. I experienced heartbreak for the first time over a guy... so I ran again, back home. I was almost 22 and had enough of living from place to place so I decided to go back to college. The tech school in the next town over had just started a computer science course and I was entranced by it. That summer before school started, I got a phone call from Chris to hang out again. Chris had gone back to college the semester after being kicked out, like most of our other friends had. It had taken me a full year and half but here I was, among the friends I'd known back in college.
During the summer, Jim and I had started hanging out more. He'd call and we'd meet for lunch or see a movie before he'd leave for his job on the weekend. Our friendship was growing and while it was still very much a friendship to Jim, I was falling in love. We'd gone to Chicago for a comic con, we met Stan Lee and had eaten Chicago pizza for dinner. His car broke down before we left the city and we had a lovely adventure of getting fluid for his radiator. It really was a great summer, and I had fallen in love with my best friend.
We were two weeks into the fall semester and I had was talking with my Grandpa on the phone. I told him that I was back in college and he said how proud he was of me. I also told him I think I loved my friend. My Grandpa immediately gave the phone to Grandma, I had to laugh at that. She told me that she met Grandpa after he'd gotten injured when Pearl Harbor was attacked, how they were friends first and had fallen in love. She told me "Kat, marry your best friend".
Two days later, my Grandpa had a heart attack. Again, I had to call my parents to tell them to come home, my Mom was at her friend's house. She flew out to Indianapolis that afternoon while I explained to my Dad over the phone what was going on. Again, I had to collect my younger brother off the school bus and tell him what happened. My Grandpa died that Sunday morning. We drove down there for the funeral the next morning. Like my Grandma on my Dad's side years earlier, it was sudden and heartbreaking.
A few days after returning home, Jim called. He was worried that I wasn't picking up when he called during the week and I explained what happened. He drove out that weekend to take me out for a double date with Chris and Greg. We went to see a movie together. During the movie, Jim reached over and held my hand. Just held it, we didn't talk, just held hands. Afterwards, Chris left and we'd discovered this was her "break up" date with Greg.
It was the end of one night and the beginning of a new morning. Like the song "Closing Time", every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.
