Woozle/Shannon

We weren't exactly close, though we did talk about a lot of personal stuff and we spent a lot of time together. That's probably pretty close by most standards. We had a lot of life-philosophical differences, though, and... it just never felt all that deep, somehow... but she's still this big chunk of my past that is now unreachable.

I did always like and admire her, though. She desperately wanted to escape her more-or-less redneck upbringing, and she pretty much did. She went to college, she was politically aware and fact-oriented. Later, she got heavily involved with the local MakerSpace (more than I ever did). She really, really tried, and often succeeded.

Phase I

I met Shannon in, I think, the summer of 1983. I know it was during that horrible year (May '83 - July '84) when Jenny was missing but we all still entertained fantasies of her returning, and I'm pretty sure it was the earlier side of that span. I was playing piano in the Bryan Center at Duke, as I sometimes did, and she walked up and introduced herself – I think she was looking for other musical people to collaborate with. She was a year younger, and just finishing high school.

There's a lot I don't remember about our interactions. I was mainly grateful to be interacting with a girl who was both interested in my companionship and not afraid of me.

Having written that, I'm now looking at it closely (and without everything being colored by dysphoria-pain) for the first time. I think what I mean is... I guess she would have been fine with it if I had "made a move on" her? But at the same time, she didn't seem to be trying to seduce me. Or maybe she did, and I just didn't notice. I think it's more likely that she read my signals accurately and saw that this is not how I operated, for whatever reason.

I remember she would frequently take me out places in her car, which I remember as being a bright red convertible. I'm not sure how accurate this memory is... but it fits... so let her be forever memorialized as driving around in a Little Red Corvette at age 16, because I think she'd like that. Anyway, I would frequently get headaches from the overstimulation, but I also liked the company; I was very isolated during that time, my only remaining friend being in Michigan.

There was a time when a male acquaintance of mine from the Duke Summer School (1982) came to visit, and I somehow got Shannon involved (I think I was looking for social insulation, and called her up), and we all went for a walk at Rhododendron Bluffs and they ended up making out on the rocks in the middle of the stream, and... you know, I was perfectly fine with that (social insulation achieved!), though she apologized afterwards anyway. For some reason I was never exactly attracted to her; I'm not entirely sure why. She did tend to be very flirty (for lack of a better word)... I think that's part of what gave me the headaches. All that focused heteronormativity.

She introduced me to her friend Amber, who lived in a trailer off Old Chapel Hill Road (in what is now one of those little pocket subdivisions) and was deaf in one ear. Amber was kind of cute and serious and I couldn't think of any basis on which to strike up a friendship, so we only ever met the one time... but I think of Amber every single time we pass that spot, and I always wonder what happened to her. (Maybe S introduced me to other friends as well; I don't remember any of them.)

I told her about Jenny. She had this idea that she had some second-sight and might be able to get some idea of Jenny's current condition; I let her do a reading (if that's the right word). She said she envisioned Jenny walking in a field somewhere. I didn't take it too seriously, and obviously it turned out to be wrong – unless you take the field as a metaphor for afterlife – which would then be appropriate, because any heaven J would have wanted to be in certainly would have included endless fields and woods.

There was a thing she said once that bothered me, though I'm absolutely sure she didn't mean it maliciously. We were talking about my past failed friendships, I think, and she said something like "it's all a barnyard dance". I'm not quite sure what she actually meant by it, but what it felt like was that she saw those friendships as basically being about sex and that they had failed for sexual-political reasons. This, to me, felt very cynical, and I remember being kind of depressed about it. (In retrospect, I can say quite definitively and with a great deal of supportive evidence that no, they were not about sex and that's not what went wrong.) I think this is another part of why I tended to get headaches around her: our views of interpersonal closeness were just... very different.

There was one time when I was with her at her parents' house, nobody else was home, we were in her bedroom, and she showed me the spot on one of her boobs where she'd had a tumor removed some time earlier. I didn't touch anything, even just out of curiosity; I had been too strongly trained by Jenny. Shannon didn't remember this incident when I mentioned it in 1991; we decided she must have been slightly drunk. (I think I must have driven over there.)

At some point, when I was working at Microglyphics, I recommended hiring Shannon to work there as well. She took over shipping/packing from me, I think, leaving me more time to do testing and support and stuff. It was at the University Drive location, probably early 1984.

I remember walking with Shannon in the parking lot at Lakewood when we bumped into Leanne Darling – apparently they were friends. I was closer in age to Sylvia, Leanne's older sister; we were in the same grade, and had been at both Duke Preschool and CFS together, but somehow I never managed to strike up a friendship with Sylvia despite having a lot of piano-stuff in common. I remember also wishing I could be friends with Leanne, after that meeting, but again had no idea how to go about it.

Phase II

to be written

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