In the summer of , I went to a two-week jazz workshop at Idyllwild Arts Academy. But, I was lucky enough to get a scholarship doing the summer of , which allowed me to go! I am well aware that the reason I and several other Hemet High School students got a scholarship to go to Idyllwild was because my high school band director, Jeff Tower, was the guy who ran the scholarship program at Idyllwild.
Curiously, lots of Hemet kids got scholarships every summer! I know this is a little bit less than fair, but I was definitely grateful for the chance I got to attend the workshop. It was a great experience, if for no other reason than I got meet many interesting students, staff, and faculty. I still remember and use! To get more to the point: I met and started dating a girl during those two weeks.
I was from a working class family in a dusty, mostly agricultural town at the bottom of the mountain. She was from West L. My family went camping outside Yellowstone for our summer vacation which I thought was pretty cool of us! Then, of course, we both went home, me to Hemet and she to Santa Monica. We talked on the phone and sent each other letters every few days. Basically, she had never seen a dairy farm before and thought those poor cows had gotten their heads stuck between the bars on the fence.
We went to the dance. It was fun. We said our goodbyes afterward. It was all pretty cute and innocent. Then, about a month later, we both kind of came to our sense and realized this whole long-distance-relationship thing was a dumb idea. We broke up on pretty mutual terms and held no hard feelings toward one another. Then, I went away to college. She was a year younger than I, so she went back to Idyllwild the summer that I moved away for college and then finished her senior year while I was in my first year of college.
I went to college about 1, miles away from home, in a place pretty foreign to me in many ways. But, due to the magic of this new fangled thing called the internet, I was able to keep in touch with this girl, the distance and strange-past-relationship-awkwardness notwithstanding.
