Stairway to Heaven

It is strange, but I believe that my cousin’s house became a kind of heaven the summer before I started high school. For those two weeks, it was a place where schedules and obligations, even parents, were as unbinding as the rumpled shorts and ratty tee-shirt I had on tonight, the kind of place I only dreamed about as a kid, where the friends I most wanted to see on my last night—Jessica, AJ, and Christy—could just show up at the door at midnight. It was a place where even an uptight 14-year old suburban kid like me could permanently attain a sense of peace within myself.

That was all thanks to my cousin Alan. He’s always been the coolest guy. By that Imean laid-back, nonjudgmental, spontaneously friendly. It made him a magnet to everybody from the “metropolis” of Binghamton to the little farming towns of Owego and Newark Valley. Every time I would go with him to a store or movie theater, he would know somebody there. All of the guys for miles wanted to be him and all the girls wanted to be with him. That summer, he taught me how to do a lay-up and how to appreciate Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Every night, we stayed up late and played Nintendo, conversing about each other’s lives like we were brothers. Even though some might find that “dorky,” the fact that Alan did it made it cool.

In my mind, I had always been the exact opposite of my cousin, especially around girls. Middle school had been a place where I was terrified over what to wear and what to say. Whereas my friends back home in Connecticut were always “busy” every Friday night, I had never had a date. And then one night that magic summer, just like that! “Alan-style,” I did. “Want to go with me to see a movie tonight with this girl, her brother, and her little sister?” he said like it was no big deal.

I barely noticed Jessica at first; it was stuff inside her house I noticed most: a broken pinball machine, mildewed furniture, and those flies! The only bright spot was the bookshelves full of all styles of literature from Homer’s “Iliad” to Anne Rice’s “Vampire Chronicles.”

I don’t remember the movie we saw that night nearly as well as the stories Christie, AJ and Jessica told about their home-life—how their father was gay and their divorced mother lived in Syracuse. Alan took all of this in stride. Know what? So did I.

Throughout the remainder of my stay, we all got together every afternoon, and Jessica was there—telling me about her favorite poets—especially the strong independent women like Maya Angelou. By the time the two weeks drew to a close, whatever had originally seemed strange about my new friends’ lives had vanished.

Now on this, our last night, here we were again. We sat on Alan’s couch watching the horror movie “Children of the Corn,” but, for the first time in my life, I was not afraid. I realized that loneliness is the cause of fear and since just by holding someone’s hand, I’d overcome my biggest fear, I no longer had to be afraid at all!

It was a feeling of confidence, my inner “stairway to heaven” I carried with me into high school. Jessica and I are still in touch. We exchange poetry—I began to write it, too; she’s been published!

Occasionally when I evaluate it all, I think of how my cousin Alan might define the laid-back open person he played the instrumental role in my becoming. “Cool. Very very cool!” he’d say. Then Alan-style, he’d smile.