Lance Olsen - Calendar of Regrets

Puritanism is at its most diabolical when, as in this perilously unimaginative nation, it somehow trusts that it's being its opposite. Swedes would swoon at my enterprise, Danes dance, but all my fallow Americans can do is pray on, preying on. Moira intended to show them what change feels like, that there remained alternatives to this alternative, and so, standing at that postal chute, she couldn't help wondering who might be thinking about her this very minute in Pleasantville, Iowa, and how… and then it was bombs away, fire in the hole, the prim squat schoolmarm barging back to her car, sliding in behind the wheel, thumping shut the door, flipping on NPR to see what progress isn't being made in the Middle East, and rolling happily out of the parking lot onto the boulevard lined with fast-food joints and bus stops and used-car lots that led toward her quadratic equations and third conjugation i-stem verbs.

Last month I received out of the blue an email from the wife of a high school semi-boyfriend named Flynn. We had semi-dated for six weeks, which in eleventh-grade is just this side of an ice age. We had exchanged bead bracelets. We had held hands, although never in public. We had gone to exactly one movie together, whose title I've forgotten, as I'm wont to do these days, and perched in the dark, untouching, learning what a date wasn't likely to be about.

Because we lived in the same town where we'd grown up, Flynn and I had stayed in indistinct contact with each other ever since, said hello through intermediaries, occasionally face to face in the ice-cream aisle at the supermarket or in front of the cash register at the gas station. Flynn played football and piano well at Jefferson Senior High, but not as well as we all wanted to believe, not well enough, for instance, to do more, when the time came, than to slip himself through the nearly shut doors of an underwhelming state school up the 494 on a scholarship that entitled him to very little when he graduated, six years later, with a BA in musicology. Next I heard, he was serving as amanuensis to a distinguished pianist in Paris. Next I heard, he was back in Bloomington, coaching at the community college. And that's where he remained for the following thirty years, married to a disappointed French lecturer named Franny, father to an easily addled son with bad self-esteem, committed to making what he ended up doing for a living sound to others like something other than a poignant misstep.

Flynn, Franny explained in her staccato e-note, entered the hospital for routine hip-replacement surgery to fix his fullback years. The operation went off without a hitch — until, that is, an infection flowered within him, one of those virulent bacterial strains that chew through a patient's every prospect. One week Flynn was perfectly fine, minus the limp and a certain throbby stiffness. The next he was on a ventilator. And the next Franny was emailing acquaintances like me in an attempt to drum up something that looked like an acceptable audience for the memorial service I had absolutely no intention of attending.

I had never been especially close to Flynn, had already lost my own mom to a brusquely failed heart eleven years ago, looked on helplessly as an unfamiliar physician signed away my increasingly dreamy dad into an assisted living center, lamented my aunt's execution by aneurysm and another unvigilant colleague's by Jeep Cherokee.

Somehow with all those passings I had still been young enough, middle-aged enough, to sidestep their full-metal impact and busy myself into distraction, but Flynn's going flapped at me enormous and inky, arrived with a blow of recognition about how one day, no matter what you do, no matter what you don't, you begin to experience a lack of light from the inside out. There's no elaborate way to say this. I got scared. I got scareder. Over the next few days, I retreated down the hall of my apartment into my office, a dark eight-by-eight cubicle spartanized with two aluminum filing cabinets, desk, swivel-chair, drawn blinds, and bare walls, and bathed in the bluewhite glow of my computer screen, eating choco-choco chip Häagen-Dazs and clicking aimlessly, then less aimlessly, then finding myself navigating one of those sites dedicated to explaining whatever happened to your high-school classmates. Did they shrug on the flab, make a fortune, hunt down a mate, become a cosmetician, move to Malibu?

I was there, it struck me, to make sure they were all all right.

And they all were, more or less. The majority had never left town, or had left, toed the void at the edge of their flat earth, and scurried back, drawn inexorably homewards by Bloomington's safe, corn-fed, suburban gravity. Some had bought their parents' houses or moved in down the lightly leafy lanes from them. They swam with their hatch in the same backyard pools they had swum as tots and teens. They traced the same routes to the same soccer fields, bakeries, pizzerias, dry cleaners, dance studios, music lessons, jujitsu classes, orthodontists, churches. The science superstar, a good guy named Gyong-si, whose parents were unimaginatively from Korea, secured a PhD in physics from Cornell and then, at the very brink of snatching a research post at a company somewhere in the new south, decided instead to open his own simulated Nepalese new-age wellness center in Chicago, while the wrestling luminary went on to impregnate and marry — in that order — a second-string football cheerleader, chub into the Michelin man's brother, and open his own 7-Eleven on American Boulevard. The queen of the flower children mellowed her way cross country and landed in Oahu, where by chance I caught her late one night in the first episode of Real Sex . She was into group groping on sunny verandas as a means of personal discovery.

Nearly every one of the other women had had kids, nearly every one of the other men had taken positions they never would have imagined taking, not in a million years, back in high school, and many used their crannies of the website to effuse about the dwindling number of days till next year's thirty-fifth reunion at the local Holiday Inn, a gala that would include a cash bar, catered finger food, a sixties cover band, a driving-range diversion for the guys, an expedition to the nail spa for the gals, and a smorgasbord of melancholy, longing, schadenfreude, and remorse for everyone concerned.

From that grayish sea of names, some of which I recalled, some of which I could convince myself I recalled if I tried really hard, but really didn't, some of which I would swear I had never seen in my life, one in particular bobbed to the surface: Aleyt . I had forgotten until I came across it, floating there, that she and I had been something like best friends through the better part of tenth grade. She showed up framed in our homeroom door one morning, fresh from Faribault, looking antsy and skinny and misplaced, pearl-blond hair in pigtails, complexion a Scandinavian dough, eyes a wisterial blue, bellbottoms too short, primrose tube-top too flat and rhinestoney by half. She was going to be, if she wasn't careful, a sitting duck. By the end of calculus, I had made a point of striking up a six-syllable conversation with her, five of them mine. By the end of lunch, we were buddies. By the end of the month, we were hanging out at the sweetshop together, biking through the park, phoning each other while ticking through homework, sleeping over at my house every other Friday night. We blew up an aluminum balloon of Jiffy Pop and peeked out at monster movies on the black-and-white set with the bent rabbit ears from beneath a shared blanket on my unfolded castro convertible. The creature from the black lagoon mooned for Julie Adams, gigantic radiation-mutated ants skittered across cityscapes toward Joan Weldon huddling in James Whitmore's arms, and my father owned an old Eastman Kodak 8mm Brownie.