Upon his sitting I got my first good look at him as throughout our opening words I had not cared to lift my nose from the copy of The Sun Also Rises with which I was engaged previous to his inconvenient request. As the children’s nursery rhyme goes he was short and stout but he had a paradoxical quality about him, something that suggested he was more athletic than his robust waistline and diminutive stature at first suggested and I felt it a wise decision not to have refused a seat to such a stocky and physically mysterious young man. Upon sitting the formerly unfamiliar interloper introduced himself to me as Henry Arthur Watts of Billings, Montana, age eighteen, now living in Portland and attending Lewis and Clark College in the study of psychology with aspirations of law school and world travel. With the conclusion of his extensive and scientifically thorough introduction, which he recited with the goofiest grin that I had ever seen, I replied that I was pleased to meet him and that my name was Thomas Barker and in my youth I had lived in various places and that now I was attending university in Washington. At first he seemed perplexed at my brief introduction but quickly regained his composure and replied in a thick Midwestern accent with his own typical Montanan, glad to know ya.

I could already tell by the odd introduction, the likes of which would be deemed fairly strange by any interpretation of the normal bounds of modern social interaction, that Henry Watts was a nervous and unconfident young man. People like Henry always talked with a smile fit for a cartoon character, and then when they spoke they always notified you of more information than you needed to know in your present situation due to their pervasive anxiety and feelings of insecurity. Now I was no psychologist, indeed it seemed that that was young Henry’s line of work, but I had always possessed an uncanny ability to read people, to know what drove them, what made them tick. In my younger days I knew many boys like Henry. I had grown up with them, I had friends like Henry and I myself was not without my insecurities or anxieties but by the time I left for college most of the boys I knew, my self included, had for the most part grown out of their adolescent emotional conditions and matured like all the girls told them they should. In fact during my last year at home I had come to view boys like Henry as week and bothersome and I tended not to associate with them outside of school. However, the days spent in Portland with my aunts would grow over the next four years and it would be nice to know someone my age so then and there I decided that Henry Watts and I should become friends if for no other reason than to provide each other a degree of companionship during future holidays in the city.

After all I would only see Henry a few days out of the year and at least we would give each other company as I also deduced that Henry probably knew less people in Portland than I did, and I didn’t know anyone. And so for the next three and half hours and over not a few cups of coffee I talked, or rather Henry talked and I listened to the story of his childhood in Montana, his parent’s ranch and his horses and fly fishing and rafting on the Yellowstone and the beautiful sunsets and chilling winters. He told me about his fears of leaving home and saying goodbye to his parents and friends and how at the same time that leaving was miserable he was also excited to finally escape the place where he had exhausted his youth and was eager to leave behind the ranch for a move to the proverbial big city and a life of exciting new adventure and all I could do was toss in the occasional “yes, I understand” or “oh, really” or “you don’t say” – the type of quick phrases everyone employs when they’re listening to someone who finds it difficult to shut up.

It was about half way through a tale about a certain young girl that he left behind when departing for college, full of details that I would be embarrassed to tell my mother and which I found difficult to believe due to certain substantial improbabilities relating to young Henry’s physique and inept social skills, that I began to realize under the circumstances inherent with our age we actually had more in common than I would have guessed upon our introduction. But despite this important realization and with the daylight fading considerably slower than my tolerance for Henry Watts’ tail of young and allegedly passionate love-lost and as soon as I found the appropriate moment, which happened to be the instant I realized I must be going, I broke in mid-sentence to inform Henry of my desire to leave as my aunts were probably wondering where I was. I shook hands and expressed my happiness in having met him and wished him good luck in school and so on and then exited onto the sidewalk. The sun was disappearing behind clouds and there was a cool breeze in the air, I caught the MAX going north and in half an hour arrived back at my aunt’s house.