JIM

The Wooly Mammoth sent me a smattering of links this morning about this movie. Here's one of the articles.

There are a lot of reasons why he would send me these links, the most prominent being the fact that Mastodon City is only thirty minutes away from Goshen and it is surprising to see that area - a place I'm sure the both of us consider our own little slice of the world - as the setting of a film that will likely make it into theaters.

Here are some things I think about when I think about Goshen. I think about tennis when I think about Goshen. It's where I went to take lessons in high school, and their team was our rival. They were better than us. There was a girl who took lessons in Goshen and I always liked her. She was Mennonite, and she was very attractive. We went out on a few dates but I was young and I didn't know what to do with a beautiful Mennonite, or how to continue a relationship, so I stopped calling her. She also, like the guy who wrote the "Lonesome Jim" script, went to Bethany Christian for High School and then to Goshen College.

The idea of the script is that a man goes to New York for awhile then returns to his hometown. Not something I can admit I haven't thought about. This girl - the one that played tennis - her father was a furniture maker. When I came back to Mastodon City for a few weeks after living in New York, I met up with her in Goshen. I made an aside that since I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, I thought I'd like to learn how to make furniture from her father (her father owns a successful Shaker-style furniture-making business). It was a joke, but when I said it, it didn't sound too impractical. If I remember correctly, she even asked me if I'd like her to talk to her father about getting me a job as an apprentice.

So, when I think of Goshen, I think of her, and I think of tennis. The first night I drove to the Mennonite girl's house to pick her up for a date, I got lost and called her from my dad's cell phone. We kept breaking up, and it took me forever to get to her place. When I got there, I entered this house with the most beautiful wooden furniture I'd ever seen. Everything was dark.

In the state tennis regionals my senior year, I played against Goshen's number 1 singles player. I had beaten him twice during the regular season, but right before the match, I twisted my ankle and I lost. That night I was inconsolable. I don't ever remember crying so hard. When my father picked me up after the bus ride to our high school, I remember that I kept apologizing to him. He was, naturally, very confused.

These are a few things that I think about when I think about Goshen.

And today I might be a little sad. I'm just not sure yet.