Danny and me

The first in a series of me (now) and my childhood crushes (then). This is Danny Meagher. My mom worked in the same lab at Rutgers College as his father back when we all lived in New Jersey. Then our family moved to Ithaca, NY and his family moved to Edinburgh, Scotland. I saw him once for an afternoon in Edinburgh during a 2 week exchange program to England I took part in as an 11th grader. He visited me one night at Wesleyan my junior year of college. I was in an embarrassingly bad mood that evening. Now he is a barrister in England and I am a grad student in San Francisco. When we were small we used to go to work with our parents on school holidays and make paper airplanes, giant tape ball wads, and paper snowflakes to sell to college students until we had enough money to buy candy out of the vending machine in the building next door. Our parents had offices on the same hall as the greenhouses and we would play hide and seek in there for hours-- it was sometimes really scary to not be able to find the other person with the loud ventilation system and erratic sprinklers. There were small toads that lived in the rain forest room of the greenhouse which could not swim-- we found this out when we put one in the algae tank and it sank to the bottom. In one of the greenhouses there was a succulent section where you could torture Venus Fly Traps and fool unsuspecting college kids to smell the stinky meat plants. When our parents had post-doc parties we would sneak sips from the adults beers and pretend to be drunk. We would play badminton and swing in the hammock barefoot. We would build impossible mazes out of refrigerator boxes in the basement, dare our younger siblings to go inside and then turn the lights off before running away, screaming up the cellar stairs. When there was snow outside we built icy ramps to tobaggan over. I was, at some point, positive that we would get married.