The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship

The weekend before classes started in earnest my first year at college, I went to Bumbershoot. All I knew about it was that it was a music and arts festival, and that some group on campus was providing school buses to take students up to Seattle. I went with a couple of my new friends, Phil and Denver D, to whom I'd been introduced by Mrs. P (she was Ms. P in those days).


I remember thinking, as I walked across campus to meet them at the bus pick-up that when I was in high school, I never would have been allowed to travel to another city with two guys I barely knew. Well, that's one of the joys of going away to college, making decisions that might run counter to ones of your parents would approve.


We wandered around the festival and looked at crafts that we couldn't afford to buy (or fit in our dorm rooms) and listened to music. Bumbershoot was enormous, and in one of the halls we found a photo vendor who offered to take your photo dressed in costume. We signed in, and dressed in the Wild West clothes. He's not pictured here (which I regret; I don't have the original version of this photo on my hard drive), but Denver D's wearing a cowboy costume and holding the Bible that went with Phil's costume. Phil had switched with him so Phil could hold the moonshine jug.


This photo marks the beginning of a great friendship that I thought would last forever. Well, talk about "unforeseen events." Phil and I were very very similar; I thought that we were two sides of the same coin, but sometimes I wondered if there even were two sides to that coin. We kissed one time, later that fall, I think because we thought we should, being of the opposite sex and as close as we were. It was gross, for both of us. Bleagh!


I recognized his faults (because a lot of them were mine). He was a good friend to me.