Gross Memories And Stopped Hearts

Yesterday I received an e-mail from my mother in which she expressed her belief that I should leave my memories of Red Wing in the past. Her specific complaint was that they are “gross.”
Fair enough. That particular period in my life was something of a low point. I had moved to Red Wing hoping to change the course of my life, and while technically I did succeed in that regard, the new course led me to crash into a brick wall.
So yes, those memories are gross, and humiliating, and some of them are actually pretty scary (particularly my attempt to grow a Ra’s al Ghul beard), but at the same time they are an undeniable part of my history and played a major role in shaping me into the person that I am today. And, from my current perspective, they’re also kind of funny in a way that they were decidedly not at the time, and they should be good for something.
Still, I suppose it is time to move on, so I will present, in visual form, a final, not at all gross memory of Red Wing: the night that Tall Chick, fresh from a wedding reception or some other formal affair, walked into the bar and made my heart stop.



Bear in mind that the only reference I had for her face were my beer-sodden memories of her, which for some reason led her to look a lot more like Mariska Hargitay than is accurate, but even so, it’s a fairly good likeness, all things considered.
To forestall anyone suggesting that I should “look her up,” I present to you a hypothetical (yet likely) version of her side of the conversation that would result from me looking her up and getting in touch with her:

“So…you say that you admired me from afar whenever you saw me out with my friends, and that we sometimes made eye contact, but you were too afraid to approach me because I filled you with a sense of ‘religious terror.’ Now, over seven years later, even though I have no idea who you are, you’ve decided to contact me. That’s…interesting.” (In a whispered aside to her boyfriend/husband) “Call the police.”

Anyway, on that note, we’ll bid adieu to my Red Wing memories, and I’ll get back to writing about more contemporary events in my life, like how I moved my bed against a different wall so that I won’t be sleeping with my head under the window, which, with the coming wintry weather, has been wreaking havoc on my sinuses, or how I bought new socks and threw away all of my old socks, even the ones that were still in good shape, simply because I was tired of having to sift through them all to find a matching pair, what with all of the disparate sizes and shapes I’d accumulated, and replacing them all with new, uniformly shaped and sized pairs eliminates that problem.
Should be a blast.