for me, it comes down to the summer after freshman year... that was when erin became garcia, i became enrique, and we became best friends. there wasn't that much to do for two fifteen year olds in boothbay harbor maine, so we had to be creative.
we dyed our hair with
magic markerswe surfed on picnic tables and got kicked out of bowling alleys and yacht club dances. we met lots of boys. the ones we liked, we told our real names. the ones we didn't, we told names like stephanie, mavis, tiffany, alexandra, and stuff. that's where we got enrique and garcia from. we wanted good names to tell people.
and the eggplants... that came out of the same creative urge, i think. for all the time we spent downtown (if you can call the central area of boothbay harbor downtown) eating lollipops and pulling up grass from the library lawn, and hiding under the footbridge humming to snails to make them come out of their shells, we spent a considerable amount of time at home, just talking or drawing pictures of mermen with happy trails, or playing rummy or hangman.
we prided ourselves on creativity in that area as well. we never did just plain old words or phrases when we played hangman. oh no. we wrote elaborate stories. one of them was about purple eggplants. we decided we liked purple eggplants. a lot. we began buying them at shop 'n save (they're cheap pets) and keeping them around to pet and play with. we named them. we loved them.
it became an
OBSESSION...
...and i guess it still is, in some ways. an obsession, that is. i like eggplants a lot. not necessarily to eat. but definitely to play with. aesthetically, they please me an awful lot. i sort of collect them. so i thought it was appropriate to include them in my page.