A Walk with Jane Austen by Lori Smith Page A

of re-creating them). They are about small things that take on great importance because all of a sudden this other person has become the most important person in your life, at least for today, probably for tomorrow, and—if you're both lucky—maybe for a long time after that.
    Over Frappuccinos, Jack said somewhat awkwardly, “Since you write about singles stuff, I should tell you, I.…urn.…1 actually just started kind of seeing someone in North Carolina. Not that I'm not enjoying hanging out, but I wasn't expecting to meet someone. You know, this other thing just started, and I.…1 wasn't looking for anything.”
    “Oh—well, I really appreciate your telling me,” I said, mustering confidence and calmness, like I had been expecting this. “That means a lot.” I then proceeded to say something awkward, about a friend who had flown up from Atlanta to take me to dinner, as if to prove that I had relationship ties in the South as well. Inside I smarted.
What was I thinking? Argh. And so what if there's a girl in North Carolina? Im here now and you like me, right?
    Jack said he and this girl had just started going out; their relationship wasn't really defined yet; he didn't know what was going to happen with it. But he wanted me to know. In some way that seemed very honorable, and somehow strange, and ultimately irrelevant. Serious enough to tell me and not serious enough to actually
be
anything. I was rattled and determined to see this as somehow chivalric.
    We moved on to things that can take months to get to in the course of everyday dating—his uncertainty about marriage and kids, my eagerness for them downplayed—trying to display it in the best possible light.
    Then we wandered through Christ Church Meadow for a while, all the way down the broad, gravel walking path to the River Isis and back, talking about all the stuff of life we have in common. He asked me what I wanted or enjoyed. I talked about renting a villa in Italy and inviting my friends, wanting to be fluent in Spanish and French and Italian, wanting to learn Greek and Hebrew and understand the cultural and historical setting of Jesus and write about those things, wanting to figure out how to really help the poor.
    He understood everything.
    In so many places our desires and goals seemed the same, or at least coming from such a similar place.
    “There are so many things I want to do. I'm afraid life wont be long enough,” I said.
    Jack replied slowly, “Well, you know, you don't have to do everything now.”

    I seemed to be perfecting a certain
eau de travel
and realized that the smells on this trip were all wrong. When I first opened my suitcase, I found a printed note saying that the TSA had inspected my bag and everything might not have been put back in the right place. It smelled horrible, like one of the paint compounds from my dad's hobby room where he works on his airplane models. I thought,
Great, they've used
some kind of chemical in my bag to detect traces of bombs, and now all my clothes smell.
But it turned out to be my Professional Firma Nail Extra Strength Base and Top Coat (a manicure kit is a must), which had leaked into its small plastic zippered bag and somehow managed to infect all of my clothes. Ugh.
    My underwear were in an old ditty bag from my backpacking days, which had infused them with the tang of cheap plastic. In a moment of inspiration, wondering at my own excessive preparedness, I pulled out dryer sheets from my laundry supplies and stuffed one in there and spread a few throughout my clothes. But now I began to sicken at the spicy, overwrought smell, which still didn't cover the bad rubber/chemical tinge my clothes had acquired.
    And then there were my lovely new green slip-on tennis shoes. I knew they might be a problem because they made my feet unusually hot, and sure enough, a foul case of foot odor was brewing. I'm not typically the foot-odor type. Seriously. But this wafted up from the region of my ankles and