My mind works in strange ways at times.

Like, let’s take bisections.

A bisection is when something spits into two things.

Roads are involved a lot in bisection: roads separate city blocks and farm fields, and roads themselves split, and diverge to two different destinations.

Which is what happens with our choices as well. It’s the law of the binary: take choice A, or take choice B.

One evening last week, I found myself driving up Manitoba between Juan Tabo and Tramway in Northeast Albuquerque, trying to find a route around an accident on north up Juan Tabo so I could get to my nephew’s spring school choir concert. Manitoba is a major residential street, or a minor thoroughfare connecting Juan Tabo and Tramway. It was used occasionally by kids in our high school to get over from one important road to the other when going to meet friends or do shenanigans. I didn’t use it a lot in high school because I didn’t drive a lot or chill with groupies at a friend’s house often.

I do remember Manitoba for the yellow Porsche 914 though.

When junior year in high school rolled around, I didn’t think of going to dances as a “have to” event, or a “must be seen there” thing to go to. I was growing socially at the time, and I think I also just thought the idea was to go and dance. At least, that’s how I mostly thought of the big dances in high school.

But, still, there was always the issue of having to have a date for those dances, and I didn’t date. I was a nice guy, but certainly a little odd to some, too goody-goody to others, a bit nerdy to others, and a question mark to many more. I was the guy who was “always in the friend zone”, even though back then we didn’t know it would be clinically labeled and diagnosable as that later. I am glad the nice part won out most of the time back then, but I didn’t know that that was enough to make some girl like me. At least, that’s what I thought. Part of me was not a dater anyways. And part of me thought there was little interest in me regardless. And that was okay.

But I liked dancing. I would go to the regular school dances and not care who thought what about me. I loved the bouncy music. Heck- dancing, even if I was goofy, was a lot of fun to me.

So, come junior year, Homecoming was a dance, and I wanted to go.

How do you find a date to Homecoming if you are a non-dater looking for a date? Well, you just ask whoever around you in class is nice to you, and talks to you once in a while.

Which is how I came to recognize the yellow flat Porsche.

Mary Ann was a kind, warm-eyed friendly girl in 5th and 6th grade humanities who laughed at my jokes along with the other handful of kids that sat in our area. She was nice, and I asked her if she wanted to go to Homecoming, and she said yes. And then I had a date for my first Homecoming dance.

Homecoming night came, and I got dressed up and she got dressed up and I went and picked her up and she was in a powder blue dress and looked wonderful and parents took pictures and I drove the Nova and we met some other classmates at a restaurant to share diner silence and to pay a hefty bill, and then we drove to the dance, and when we went in, we walked together and head-nodded some people we each knew and then sat awkwardly at a table and it was kinda dark and loud and I didn’t know what to say, and we may have danced once or twice, and then it was getting later and she went and talked to her friends and I felt like hyperventilating, like a comic in front of a dead crowd, and then it was time to go, and I took her back to her house on Manitoba- the one with the yellow Porsche 914 in the driveway- and went home.

It was a little weird in humanities around her for the next week- my jokes were less often, and less funny- and in two weeks, she had a boyfriend.

But her eyes were warm, and sometimes she’d be cruising through the high school parking lot in that Porsche with the convertible top back, and we’d wave hello sometimes.

And life and school and all that went on.

I was a pretty good “one night stand around” at those dances. I’d take a girl out once, to that big event, and that was it. And then submerge.

Which is where bisection comes in. No, not surgical bisection. Just the bisection of a life based on choices made.

Mary Ann, you went your way, and I went mine, and I haven’t seen anything about you since high school, and I am just curious- how’d it turn out for you? How did your path go?

You always had warm-eyes and a kind laugh, and I appreciated that about you.

And seeing your Porsche in the driveway of your house on Manitoba back then, back in the days.

Naturally, last week, when I drove up that street for a first time in a long while, it wasn’t there.

But I guess you still were.

I hope you are well, and that wherever you are, you are still trucking around in that little classic.

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Image Credit: “VW-Porsche 914 (1974)” by Andrew Bone via Flickr.
Creative Commons 2.0.