Summer 1994

Ten years ago:

After we graduated from college - and I mean later that day - I made a run to the liquor store, then Christie and Sonya and I and a few other people went to Heber Springs. We drank and ate and swam and took the pontoon boat out on the lake for days at a time. After about a week we went back to Conway, though. None of us had a real, post-college job and we were all a little antsy.

We were living at the apartments at Clifton Street then, a sprawling, vaguely barn-ish complex painted yellow, right behind Hendrix College and not twenty yards from the train tracks. They were busy train tracks, too. Trains rumbled by at all times of the day and night

It was a two-bedroom third-floor walk-up. It was big, though, and as nice as a college apartment can be. We had black mini-blinds in our bedroom; even at noon the room was dim.

Sonya and I had a pile of graduation money, but we didn't blow it. We lived very frugally. We stayed home, staying up late and sleeping all day. We listened to Jimmy Buffett constantly.

I had a bacterial infection. I didn't know where it had come from and neither did my doctor - I hadn't even been sick that summer, but suddenly I was running a high fever and felt like shit. I was given powerful drugs. I laid on the couch for a week, napping and sweating.

About six weeks after graduation Sonya got a job at Hasting's, a books/music/video store and the center of cultural life in Conway. I got a job at the one-hour photo in Wal Mart - the town's center of commerce. We had our collective finger on the city's pulse, the Wife and I.

I remember lots of staying up late and playing Sonic the Hedgehog. And drinking. And hanging out with our friends. Many of them had just graduated, like us, but it seemed like no one had left town.

It wasn't a bad time. Just very transitional.