Interlude

One of my many fellow high school students was Andy Goldman. Andy and I had attended the same schools since junior high. He was a typical kid...had dirty blonde hair, brown eyes and braces. He was about 5'3 and loved music. In our junior year he ran the high school radio station and you never saw him without his headphones. We knew each other by virtue of the intersection of our circles of friends, but we weren't close, so I had no reason or occasion to see him during summer vacations.

On the first day of classes in my senior year, I was stunned when I walked into homeroom and discovered that Andy was, literally, 7 INCHES TALLER than he had been three months before.
Like most people, I'd heard of "growth spurts" of course, but to hear of such an urban myth-y kind of thing and to actually witness it are two completely different things. I found it fascinating only in a freak show kind of way...it would be over two decades before I found anything in it that I ever connected to my life personally.

My recent underground retreat from the blogging realm resulted from my own growth spurt. I grew not physically, but emotionally, spiritually and psychologically. I view the world very differently than I did two months ago - my interaction with it and its effect on me have altered in so many ways that I have yet to discover them all. For the first time since...high school, probably...I am experiencing mental and emotional sensations so new to me that I, wordsmith that I often am, often cannot even find the words to describe how I feel. It is both exciting and disquieting, leaving me feeling a little giddy and unsteady in my formerly ordinary life.

Thus truly begins a new chapter in my life (another quaint saying I never related to myself before), and my secret exhibitionist nature dictates that I share with you what I can of the journey. Some, as is only to be expected, must remain either only with me or at least out of the written realm. Discretion, I am not just learning, is always the better part of valor.

Pray, forgive me my trespasses, and join me in the days to come in what is sure to be an beguiling quest of personal enlightenment full of triumphs, tribulations, embarrassment, and laughter...but most of all, that growth which, although come lately, will tattoo upon me the map of my future roads.

Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. The show is about to begin...