Mixed in with everything there were a few things that still have some emotional resonance after all these years: the set of dishes (all mugs broken, one bowl broken, but three bowls and eight plates still intact) that I bought when Mark moved in, a few things of my Mom's (a kitsch Bundt cake pan from 1972, a huge, heavy mixing bowl from Disneyland), and then this thing: a cherry pitter that I bought in 1990.
Here's the story...
In 1988, I met
cbertsch. We were both undergrads at Cal; we were both majoring in English. Amusingly enough, we wound up in the same French 1 class, taught by an annoying German. [We didn't realize this until after he busted us for talking crap about his instructional stylings in German after class one day.] We wound up becoming good friends, and he introduced me to his then girlfriend A. Now, I was young and inexperienced and all that good stuff, so when A. suggested that we, ahem, have sex, I said sure, what the heck. Of course, in retrospect, this really is not something you want to do with your best friend's girlfriend, but what the hell, it was Berkeley, I was 19, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.Long story short, they broke up eventually, Charlie met
kdotdammit [who, truth be told, was and is awesome in ways that surprise me every time we meet], I moved to Tübingen, Germany for a year abroad in 1989-90, A. found a new friend in grad school named Joe, and A. thought Joe and I would make good boyfriends, so she kinda hooked us up when I got back in the summer of 1990.Now, Joe was a handsome guy, but stoner grad students who care just a little bit too much about ST:TNG and S/Z are honestly not the kind of people I should have been dating. Still, I had nowhere else to start, so it went well enough for the rest of the summer.
In the summer of 1990, Twin Peaks was all the rage, so I decided to bake a cherry pie for a party at Joe's in, oh, maybe September or so of that year. That's why I bought this $6 cherry pitter from Whole Earth Access - it was a big deal at the time, seeing as how I was making barely $6 an hour at the student union bookstore. I proceeded to bake a bodaciously awesome cherry pie at his place, and everyone loved it, but the next day he finally admitted that my systematic wrecking of his kitchen caused him no end of upset and for him, it was the last straw of our so-called relationship. This was of course tremendously upsetting - this was not only the first guy I'd kinda sorta dated, but this was the first time I'd been broken up with.
And it was all because of a $6 cherry pitter, sort of. Ah well.
The pitter's in the trash now, waiting for a dump run this weekend. The other stuff, though, I'll keep.
At least I rebounded well from all of that. In early 1991, I placed a personal ad in the East Bay Express, which garnered three responses: one, from Mark, whom I ended up dating for a couple of years; one, from
bix02138, to whom I was so attracted (tall, handsome, librarian-y) that I bolted after a single evening spent together, and one more from someone I never called or met, a man also called Mark who graduated from Lewis and Clark College before doing a MPH at Cal. 