Image via rlr77Provo is a marvelous place to be in the summer, or it was in 1996, anyway. There was no traffic, and because of the wonky way landlords collect rent based on the school season, it was much cheaper to live in the summer. Rent was collected per person in the apartment, not per unit, so it was not uncommon to have 6 people per apartment, which is how I lived for a couple of years at the Reeg. But in the summer, fewer students = your own room for 4 months. So Michelee and I lived in 1996 with two other girls, one of whom had a boyfriend named Butch, fought with them over the thermostat, wrote bad (me) and good (Michelee) poetry that we faxed back and forth to each other at our respective Carol's Copy Centers (me in Orem, she in Provo), and hung out with cute boys, sometimes at a squeaky clean pool hall on 5th West called QBall. (Not that often, though, because it was like $6 and that was a fortune.)
I'm a pretty terrible pool player, but the actual playing wasn't really the thing that was awesome. I wrote a poem about it which I will never share, because college English major summer poetry is best hidden away forever, but it was about how annoying my name is, the point at which people in my life make the transition to Lis, and how at Qball one time, that was monumental. (Except not.) Michelee had a crush on a boy who played jazz trombone, whom we called "the boy," and I really wish I still had the poem she wrote about him, on shiny roll fax paper, because I want to go back, relive it all again.
