Pancho does Sweet Sixteen

When I was sixteen, I went to live in Germany as an exchange student. I lived with a German family, attended a German school, partied with German kids, ate German food, and had no buffers in my first language aside from evenings spent reading Don Quixote, pretending to be a teenage knight-ress errant (I was the rational companion, faithfully advising my cohort about the potential dangers of those menacing windmills-- afterall..., it doesn't take a space shuttle door-crafting scientist to know that a breeze-borrowing machine of that stature is capable of devouring a cactus and three infants while challenging a tempest to a game of checkers!).

Oddly, though, my most potent and soul-stranglingly influential memory of the experience was...
not the time I rode a tandem bicycle into a creek as my friend and I illustrated the symptoms of the Jaegermeister Curse via fragranced, throat-catapulted projectile displays...
nor was it when I got lost in the countryside, broke bread with an old woman who made me rake leaves in exchange for directions...,
or, when I failed every subject but got the highest score in math (the only subject that required no language abilities)...

It was, in fact, the initial plane ride over there.

I can still taste the vivid excitement/fear brew that tickled my pubescent chemical make-up...; that frightened-shitless-of-the-unknown-but-furiously-excited jolt of existence-recognition that I've come to love and embrace.

And, that's how I'm feeling today...: that same Oh-No!Oh-Yes! sentiment that likes to take you by the hand and point out, again, your mortality and the invigorating brilliance of this peanut-shell-onion-layered-Mexican-bean-dancing Spark that is life...

-c, what is this cliche poetic babble you're toying with?, you might be asking...

Well, a super special someone is coming home tomorrow from Japan, and I couldn't be more scared... and ecstatic!!
(Up the Creek old-timers might remember him from last August's post about obnoxious couples in the Japanese public eye..)

But, hey!, lots would give up their tax returns to feel sixteen and headed for a foreign land again!

I, on the other hand, got lucky...

All it took was a few minutes in the waiting room, and a professional business meeting...

(What can I say? Loki just isn't as busy these days...)