Lo
I met Lo the first year I lived at Oxford Housing at the University of Michigan. She worked at the front desk, as I did. We immediately hit it off once we discovered we were each English majors. While I hated Victorian Literature, she gobbled it up (watching her read those huge novels full of pretentious manners made me queasy); on the flip side, she thought my love of Medieval/Renaissance Literature was self-punishment at best. No matter – we got on well despite these key field differences.
Along with a third member of the front desk, we became good friends, me being the glue of that triumvirate. It’s hard to pinpoint when we became friends, or even why; Lo was so different than me, had such a different life experience and life outlook, did things that I thought were inexcusably crazy, I’m unsure as to why we liked hanging out together so much.
Lo introduced to my first alcoholic drink; she gave me relatively sage advice where guys were concerned; we helped each other out in English classes though we never had one together; we spent all of our four hour shifts constantly gabbing, English assginments forgotten; we weathered the romantic storms of the front desk from the safety of sanity (no way we’d ever date a co-worker) and tried to keep all parties calm. One of the funniest moments I can remember is summer 2000 – Binder Park Zoo-bound, Lo in the back seat of another friend’s car, completely hung over from the previous night. Lo held her infamous anti-Valentine’s Day party in the winter of 2000; what made me attend is beyond me.
Lo’s mother died when she was young, and her father had remarried. She didn’t seem to communicate with her family too much; there were times she used the front desk phone, via transfer from home, to tell them she wouldn’t be coming over because she was at work (clever, that one; the caller ID couldn’t give her away). She was quite the drinker, spending hours and hours during the summer at Dominick’s in the evening, hung over in the work bathroom in the mornings. There was plenty of drug use, plenty of dodgy friends, plenty of getting through blue book exams completely plastered. There were so many stories of Lo pulling success out of her ass that the rest of us were left stunned, unable to do anything but laugh. We couldn’t discourage her behavior, and we tried. She brushed off our concern.
The summer before her graduation, she met a guy who was her destiny, she said. It is Lo who originally said that she wanted to lock him up in a gold cage and have his babies, lifting the line from Days of Our Lives. Said guy moved to Seattle that December. Lo was determined to follow at the end of the next summer. She worked hard, partied hard. She continued on her quest even as the guy’s phone calls diminished, even as his waning interest in her was apparent to everyone. She forged ahead, saving money, finding an apartment with some friends who were moving out with her. By that August, we all said our tearful goodbyes. I still have a picture from that night wherein four people who worked at the front desk bid Lo farewell, smiling but pretty damn sad inside.
Lo arrived in Seattle, having told us that she would use her English degree to procure a waitressing job. That’s another thing about Lo – she had money, most definitely, so the establishment of a career was not a concern. Having fun and adventure were. In Seattle, she got a job as a hostess at a restaurant, then promptly quit it to work in bookstore. There she stayed for four years. In the meantime, she learned that the guy she had left Michigan for had been cheating on her since almost Day One; some of the friends she had brought with her became not so good friends; so many people had ended up following her to Seattle that she once complained to me that it seemed like going to the bar in Seattle was just like hanging out at Dominick’s. She took up running; she quit smoking and the drugs, cut down significantly on the drinking. The idea of moving once more began to brew in her head.
She did, this time to California. She’s working in a running store. I received her Christmas card last week, in which she gushed about the guy who followed her to California, in which she confessed she was pretty sure she was going to marry him (when a girl says that to another girl, and we don’t say it lightly, it’s probably true). I read her letter, so happy for her, yet a tiny bit jealous. "You’d love it, WordNerd," she said. "You really would."
I suspect I would. Even for all her faults when it came to the substance abuse, Lo has a flair for living that can only be described as intoxicating (and yes, I see what I’m saying). Lo has never been afraid to try anything new; Lo ignores conventional wisdom and follows her own wishes. It’s true that we’re not in the same kinds of situations, ,but if I had some of her courage (or recklessness), even just a little, I’d probably be able to do some of the things I’d love to but have avoided. There is a part of me that wishes I had the courage to just up and move; there is a part of me that wishes I had the means to do whatever the hell I wanted; there is a part of me that desperately wants to throw off inertia and go for the gusto. Lo has done all of the above, even while being scared. The move to Seattle, this new move to California; she’s been afraid each time, she confessed, but that was part of the challenge.
I don’t know exactly what I’m trying to say about Lo; as my friend, I do miss her quite a bit. "Will I ever see you again?" she wrote in her last letter. I do hope so. I also hope that one day I could have a bit of her panache; maybe it’ll come to the other Oxford clerk, English major gal one day.
