[TheChamp-Sharing]

SHOW NOTES

In this week’s episode, I talk about how I watched a friend of mine fall in love.

TRANSCRIPT

Have you ever watched someone fall in love?

Their outlook becomes rosier. They smile more. They’re more pleasant to be around.

I’ve been fortunate enough to see friends in my life fall in love. And when it happens, it makes me happy.

In this week’s sketchbook, I want to talk about when a friend of mine met someone special.

***

Hello, and welcome to episode 27. Twenty seven is a lovely number. A number of love.

Ok, maybe I’m making that up, but this is definitely an episode with a flair of romance and infatuation.

I wanted to talk this week about a friend who met a very special woman. He met her when he was in college, and he was completely infatuated with her.

I was in college in Des Moines, Iowa, and he was in school in St. Louis, Missouri. I visited him throughout the summer and we would hang out, usually in the form of driving through the scenic streets of St. Louis and listening to jazz.

I remember him telling me about her.

My friend, who is usually pretty even keeled about things, was excited. To this day I’ll never forget the enthusiasm in his voice.

What’s even crazier is that I was driving. Usually my memory is crap when I’m multitasking, but I remembered all his words crystal clear.

It was a rainy evening in St. Louis, and we were stuck in crazy traffic.

So while we were fighting traffic and listening to some jazz, he told me this woman’s story.

It affected me so much that I went home later that night and I wrote the story down in my sketchbook. This was back in 2008, I think.

There are a few times in a writer’s career when you realize that you’re experiencing something special that will end up in a book someday.

Now, I’ve changed the woman’s name and some key details, but what follows is pretty much exactly what my friend told me.

***

Regina has cream-colored skin, like chai tea. Her skin matches her personality. Thick lips but not too thick, bluish-green eyes whose color you can’t quite pin to blue or green—eyes that leave you dumbstruck in conversation when it’s your time to speak. She likes to drink for the taste of alcohol—not for the drunkenness. She prefers gin to vodka, rum to whiskey. She adores flavored drinks and Amarettos.

She was born in Guyana. She’s half-Lebanese and half-Chinese, and she went to school in Holland. She speaks English, Dutch, French and German—maybe Farsi and Arabic, too.

We were in a book store and I was looking at this art book. Oil paintings of Scottish castles.

“What are you reading?” she asked.

“An art book,” I said.

She snatched the book out of my hands and started thumbing through the pages.

“I love art,” she said.

I mentioned that I listened to flamenco music and her eyes grew wide—she was the only person on the trip who liked it, too.

“I don’t know if she was saying she liked all these things because it was true or because she liked me. I don’t want her changing her opinion because of me. I want to know who she really is, you know? No need to put on any shows for me.”

***

I captured the conversation and I filed it away. I forgot about it.

My friend only saw the woman a few times before she ended up traveling away. He moved on.

Nearly a decade later, when I was writing my book, Be a Writing Machine, I was describing how I keep a sketchbook, and I had an idea to share some examples.

I have thousands of different entries—bits and pieces I’ve captured over the years.

I found the conversation, and it brought a smile to my face.

I told my friend about it, nearly ten years later, and he’d forgotten about her, too. Funny how life goes on.

But he was floored when I read the entry to him. He couldn’t believe how good my memory was.

It was a reminder to me of how cool that moment was for the both of us—him living it, and me hearing him retell it.

That’s what I love about being a writer. When you capture someone on the page in true color, it moves people in many ways. It becomes permanent art that lasts forever. Even if it affects just one person, it was worth it.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Memory…is the diary that we all carry about us.” Oscar Wilde

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