I haven’t had a huge amount of time off in the last few weeks. Today is Monday, and while I often have Monday off at my newspaper, that’s the day I teach photography, so it’s not really a day off, and as it happens, this was the only day my newspaper could arrange for a gym for our all-star basketball game, so I’ll be covering that this evening.

I try to fit projects into the gaps and cracks, but often enough I get inspired by something else, from the weather to sunsets to brilliant conversations, and today was no exception: as I was cleaning out and archiving files in my iCloud drive, I came across this photo:

I’d been looking around Google Maps for this and that, and why I thought to navigate to my first girlfriend, Tina’s, house, I don’t know.

Still, it brought back a spitload of memories, mostly positive ones, about my time with her and this house. She and I dated from the middle of my junior year in high school until the end of my first year in college.

Of course, the rabbit hole of Google Maps lead to the rabbit hole of my own journal.

I first went to Tina’s house in November 1979 because Tina stopped showing up in class, and I found out she’d been in a car crash. I helped pick glass out of her hair.

I can picture the inside of the house: the dark, seldom-used living room on the right side of the photo, the kitchen and dining room in the middle, and the den on the left side. Tina’s bedroom was at the back on the right, and it had bright red shag carpet, and she had a bright pink velour bed spread. A trio of shelves above it displayed her Smurf collection.

There were a lot of long goodbyes on that front porch, winter and summer.

Since I wrote in a journal, she gave me a copy of Jay’s Journal (since debunked as Mormon propaganda), which I read cover-to-cover in a couple of days.

We woke up February 9, 1980 to find a foot of snow on the ground. I walked to Tina’s (one mile in the snow) where her mom and siblings joined friends for pizza, then session after session of snowball fights.

“I never had so much fun in my whole life. We were rolling around on the grass when I saw an airplane fly over, so I yelled, ‘air raid,’ and we both ran and hid under George the bush,” I wrote later that year.

In October 1980, she had an operation on her elbow. My journal doesn’t say why, but her arm was in traction with a drain tube in it. I have no recollection of that at all.

On another occasion, we were horsing around and I dove out that front window, breaking one of the panes with my heels. I wasn’t hurt, and had to buy a new window pane, but I remember that moment perfectly clearly.

She considered Dan Fogelberg’s Longer as “our song,” though I did not. I took her to see Fogelberg in concert in Norman in early 1982.

She worked at a toy store in the mall.

She had an older brother and a younger sister. I don’t remember much about them. Her mom and dad were divorcing at the time, but she and I stayed in the margins of that as much as possible.

As far as I know, there are no photographs of us together.