"You've had SIX boyfriends!"

I’m sitting in a random coffee shoppe…however I don’t know that it can fully be classified as such…it is as though a small North Carolina town tried create a coffee shoppe but could not quite grasp the concept of an authentic place to meet and drink the best warm beverage of all…I shouldn’t knock it too badly because there is mysteriously something about entering this establishment which makes me feel as though I am suddenly walking inside a movie…and the coffee is not half-bad, either... It is a very interesting place indeed!
Landen would be so proud of me for discovering such a place. He was always a fan of discovering “hole in the wall” places and was a pretty great critic at that. If you ever wanted to know where to go and where not to go you would ask Landen Reimer. He was like a Former’s travel book in and of himself and I delighted in being apart of many of his adventures.
This memory really has nothing to do with him being an adventurer or travel book or anything of the sort but I have been chuckling quietly to myself all morning about this memory and need to blog about it to share it the cyberspace world…
One night in college Landen and some friends and I went to study at Barnes and Noble. First of all we were disgusted because there were no more available tables in the café so we had to settle down to study at the incredibly awkward tiny tables in the Junior’s department… we had a lot to study…it was getting later by the second… if I remember correctly they even messed up one of our drinks…then no one could study because Landen had just gone out with this girl the night before who at the time he thought was the most incredible girl he had ever met but was not sure what his next move was to be… so after sharing all of his thoughts to a group of stressed friends who tried to listen in between reading thick books and memorizing terms and definitions, he began to seek counsel from our friend Roxanne Gibbert who was entirely in tune with what Landen was sharing. By this time in order to concentrate on the pressing subjects before us I had moved a few steps away into the Storytime area…two of our other friends were by the Curious George display and yet another friend moved away entirely from the group to the Beverly Cleary’s Romana series…Landen and Roxanne were still at the awkwardly tiny table in the Junior’s department of Barnes and Noble. My ears heard bits and pieces of their conversation as I tried focusing in on my terms and definitions for Child Growth and Development…I heard Roxanne talk about her diverse dating life and some experiences she had…she and Landen grew louder in conversation as he exclaimed a few things and disagreed with a few of her experiences…I was annoyed so I grabbed the little Captain Underpants doll sitting next to me and threw him as hard as I could at the two people sitting at the awkwardly tiny table in the back of the Junior’s department in Barnes and Noble. Out of nowhere a stern and fearsome bookseller appeared… I thought” great…I do almost nothing… then I do something and I get in trouble!”…so I began to apologize until I discovered she knew nothing about the Captain Underpants doll…she had come to confront Landen and Roxy about their adult conversations in the Junior’s department! I guess some overly concerned mother expressed her disapproval of their conversation and demanded the bookseller to take care of the situation... now it should be noted that Landen and Roaxanne definitely did not talk about sexual behavior or anything of the sort…only the basics of relationships and communication…They tried to convince the bookseller that they had talked nothing of the sort but she like King Agrippa was almost persuaded but not convinced. The best part of it was 2 of us were wearing CBC hoodies! What a glorious testimony!
Landen was mortified…Roxanne thought it was hilarious…I couldn’t believe it…and some of the others were just annoyed…we sat around and tried to figure out what the overly concerned mother could have picked up on that she did not want her little 8 year old to hear… the only thing we could figure out was at toward the beginning of the conversation Roxanne had mentioned she had had 6 serious boyfriends to this particular date…Landen unbelievably exclaimed, “You’ve had 6 boyfriends!”…but Landen always spoke with a little different accent so when said “six” often it sounded like “sex”…so the overly concerned mother must have heard, “You’ve had SEX with your boyfriends!”…when we finally concluded with this it was definitely time to go home because we could hold back laughter and embarrassment no longer. After my final apology to the booksellers on behalf of our behavior that evening we exited Barnes and Noble to confront all that life had for us.
I will never forget that humorous evening!