I was with my friend Mike sitting on a curb in Deep Ellum, sometime in the fall of 1992, when I first met Anne Anderson. I had seen Anne, sure, around the dorm and stuff. But I hadn't met Anne Anderson.
She strode toward us—strode is the word, nothing else, because Anne didn't walk when she was in this mode—with that smile and that blast of hair. She seemed to own the whole damn street. It was warm outside, early-fall perfect in Dallas, and Mike and I were dejected because we'd driven all the way up from Austin, freshmen at UT, and we couldn't even get our hands on a beer. It was late.
She said hi, we said hi, and that was about it. She strode away, smiling and striding, striding and smiling.
Shit, I thought. We're a couple of rubes.
And then, my 18-year-old brain working, I wonder if she could get us beer?
But she was gone. I imagined her dancing with Annie Lennox-I do remember this, I don't know why—in a place that was, I was sure, impossible for a couple of rubes to find.
We stood up after that and set to finding something interesting. Get up off your asses, Anne had said without saying. There are things to be had.
Fifteen seconds with Anne Anderson is about all I remember from that weekend trip to Dallas. There was some football and some beer and probably some drunk driving. I was 18: It's all pretty murky. But I remember Anne.
Anne had something of adulthood about her while the rest of us were shaking off adolescence. She had moods and different personalities and opinions. This was new to me. While the rest of us were still formulating personae, Anne was living hers. It was powerful stuff. I admired her very much, something like an older sister. She was wise—don't get me wrong, some of her (strongly held) opinions, I thought, were dumb-ass (to use the word I probably used then). But she knew things I didn't, and likely never will.
Like how to light up a room. How to laugh-really laugh, I mean, from deep down. How to be joyful, for no reason in particular. How to tell someone to shove it. How to stride.
She had a startling physical presence, a sort of electricity. She moved well through space—purposeful, graceful, and strong. She could also be sullen and surly—this is the Anne I had seen in the first few weeks of our freshman year at the dorm—and she could be an incredibly powerful and joyous presence, as I witnessed that day on the curb.
She didn't seem to be trying to do any of it, that was the important thing. She just was.
Anne vanished sometime toward the end of my fourth year. I was never in her innermost circle of friends, so it took me a while to notice that she wasn't at the usual parties. She cut off all her hair and seemed to crawl inside. The narcolepsy seemed to change her entire personality. I never asked her why she had changed, if she was lonely, what we could do, and don't know that it would have ever occurred to me to do so.
I don't know that I'd have the courage to do that now.
But I do know this: Anne Anderson would.
Anne said what she thought—a simple thing, really. But in doing so, she cut through all the crap that tangles people up inside. She was direct, often annoyingly so. But I know that if one of us fell into the doldrums like she did, she would have knocked down the door to find out why.
Get off your asses. There are things to be had.
I miss Anne Anderson very much.
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