09.05.2008 - 4:48 p.m.

Today I was picking at my email backlog again, trying to get my archives small enough to stop triggering that �Your Mailbox Is Over The Size Limit� system message every night at 12:01. I found this one in my sent folder, from August, 2004:

I, Stonebridge, hereby authorize Fitzgerald Mazda to charge $500 (and only $500) (and only once) to my Visa, in order to hold a black Miata, stock #Z5405.

Obviously, I didn�t use my blog name, and also I listed my card information afterwards. I made the hold through email because my dad had told me that when you�re buying a car, you always walk off the lot without making any promises. Which I managed, though I don't know how convincing I was. I think I put the hold on it the next day.

I deleted the email, but I thought the parentheses were cute, so there you go.

No, more than that. It was uplifting, and sweet, to remember the anything-possible feeling I had when I bought this car. That was the moment, in my head, when I crossed from kid to adult. Renting my own apartment was close, but this was something I owned. Something that was not what my parents would have considered.

And this week, today, the campus is swarmed with students on that same cusp. Right now, on the patio across from my office, there�s a student clubs fair, and they�re all out there, the barefoot hippies, the serious clean-shaven ones who think themselves already adult, the girls with too much perfect skin showing, the athletes with pragmatic ponytails and ice saran-wrapped against their knees.

I wish them all so well.

-stonebridge

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