The Prom – Something I’ve Learned From Teenagers About Love

“If he really wanted to be with you, he’d be with you” — Phil

This was pretty much the only thing my brother had to say about the struggles I was having in my last serious relationship.  The guy lived a thousand miles away, and had only come to visit me a single time.  I had visited him a couple of times and we had made plans for him to come and visit me again on Valentine’s Day last year.  Things were getting very serious between us.  At least I thought they were.

It didn’t take long after my getting back home after my last visit for him to back away from his plan to come on Valentine’s Day.  He was going to come some other time in February, after all “It doesn’t need to actually be ON Valentine’s Day”.  And shortly after determining that a Valentine’s Day visit wasn’t in fact necessary, he backed off from the visit entirely.  At the same time professing his love!  I didn’t get it.  I believed he wanted to be with me, but his actions certainly didn’t back that up.  I kept making excuses for him.  I soooo wanted to believe he wanted to be with me, but that there was something about him and his unknown struggle that seemed to make it difficult for him.  So I excused his behavior and lamented what seemed to be an insurmountable chasm between us.  And, my brother quietly and matter-of-factly said “if he wanted to be with you, he’d be with you”.  When the guy decided to bail from the relationship pretty much without any warning, and with a set of very odd explanations as to why, and after having done this to me already a number of times in the past, I finally decided I’d had enough and said, fine, you want to walk away, walk away.  To myself I finally admitted that I was tired of the games he seemed to be playing with me and that I couldn’t take his inconsistency and the incongruities of his words and his actions any more. 

As the days turned into weeks and months, I kept making excuses for him.  And Phil’s words kept coming back to me….If he had wanted to have been with me, he would have been with me.  If he loved me enough and there truly WAS some unknown struggle that was keeping him from me, he would have addressed that issue…

Then “Colin and Stephanie” and “Clare and John” happened, and I realized that not only were Phil’s words true, but that I NEEDED to have a guy show his intent by pursuing me…by wanting to be with me.

At sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen years old, these four teenagers have shown me that love does what it takes.  Colin, who lives in Northern California, has worked and saved and has traveled to Colorado to visit Stephanie three times since November!  Clare’s John also lives in Northern California.  Both John and Colin have flown in this weekend to take Stephanie and Clare to their prom.  What fun!  And what message does their coming here send to these girls?  That they are valued.  That the boys recognize the importance of things like the prom and that if the girls think its important, so do they.  It tells these girls that they want to be with them.  That they want to spend time with them.  And that they will do what it takes to make that happen, even though they have no idea what the future holds for them.

Don’t they look amazing??  Thanks for the love lesson, kiddos.  I needed that.  Have a GREAT time at the prom! 

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A Day in LoDo

A couple of weeks ago I met my friend Abner up in Denver to spend the afternoon.  It was a lovely day.  We’d been threatened with snow, but there was barely a cloud in the sky and it was warm in the sun.  We decided to meet at the Breckenridge Brewery.  It’s one of the local microbreweries and I’ve heard they have some good offerings.  I tried the Agave Wheat.  It was a murky looking glass of darkish amber stuff.  But it tasted awesome! 

The area of town that is host to the Breckenridge Brewery is known as “LoDo”, or Lower Downtown.  It’s an historical district, also known as the ballpark district.  The brewery is right down the street from Coors Field where the Colorado Rockies play.  I love baseball (I believe I have mentioned this before).  I used to adore the Dodgers, but fell out of adoration with them in the 90’s.  I tried to fall in love with the Anaheim Angels, and things were going sort of okay, but then they became the Los Angeles Angels, which, even removing the absolute redundancy of the name from the equation, was just wrong.  End of that fledgling relationship!  And then I moved to Colorado.  I wondered if I could become a Rockies fan.  Well, after seeing the Rockies “house”, I think I could very well do so.  I drove past Coors Field the last time I was up in Denver and I wanted to explore it further by walking all the way around the stadium.  Of course that took us into a couple of restricted access areas, but despite passing a number of empty security vehicles, we were successful without even being approached.

What a great stadium and wonderful location for it.  On the 20th street side there was a pedestrian walkway which brought you through an archway of sorts.  The supports had a collection of “ball” tiles on the fronts and backs.  Here’s one of the panels:

One day I’ll go back and try to individually photograph each and every tile in these columns.  Some are mighty clever.  Here are a couple of my favorites:

Through the archway and a there’s a perfect “out in left field” gate upon which to take a foot picture, which of course, we did.

In the process of meandering around town, and laughing hysterically at this and that, we passed by a number of buildings which had either been, or were being converted into lofts and condos.  Of course, with my love of 1)  cities, 2)  buildings, and 3)  real estate, my heart was pretty much palpitating.  There was one small row of loft-type spaces in particular that caught both of our attentions.  The units were three stories tall, and on the backsides there were balconies off the second and third floor.  Rising from the third floor balcony was a spiral staircase leading to rooftop terraces.  From those rooftops I bet you could see the entire downtown skyline as well as Coor’s Field.  And I bet you could easily hear the roar of a baseball crowd from there, too.  I was imagining being up there on a hot and sticky summer day basking in the fierce high altitude sun and BBQ’ing with friends while hearing the crack of bat on ball.  Perfection.

I have longed to buy a property in a city center for decades now.  Chicago has always been my city of choice for this, and Dublin would be pretty amazing, too, as would London.  An apartment in Syracuse, Sicily or Kinsale, Ireland has been a dream floating around my head.  I even looked at lofts in Los Angeles which were pretty spectacular, but after being in this area of Denver, I think Denver could suit me nicely!  Pipe dreams!! 

Near the end of our LoDo traipse, we crossed a street only to be faced with the biggest set of doors I’ve ever seen that weren’t at the front of an old European church!  Here’s Abner being dwarfed by the doors:

Thanks for another fun day just hanging around, Abner!  Let’s do it again soon.

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