The sentence leaped at me as I read last night, a father telling his teenaged daughter: "[t]hey'll be lining up three deep, you'll see."

I was not the girl anyone lined up three deep for. High school was a blur of vocal music, a few drunken escapades, or what my friend H. would call our "errant adventures". I had no social skills. I couldn't read people, not because I'm autistic (though there are those who would question that a bit) but because I had no experience in peer interactions. My family was not a good training ground for prosocial skills.

As an anxious child, I would be found reading books alone in another room while at a friend's birthday party. I played in the neighborhood with other kids, building forts and wading the creeks, but they were my safe people. They weren't people I was thinking of dating. They were just the posse, though we didn't call it that in the 70's.

Three deep. The only thing three deep in my high school existence was the group without a group. My friends were the girls who were as unlikely to get a date as I was, for various reasons. A. was just on the high side of normal intelligence, and probably had been drugged-affected in utero. S. was similar, and A. and S. had both been adopted, which I now know means you get what you get and probably it's not a kid with a high IQ. S. had a baby at 17 who was conceived with her 14-year-old boyfriend, who fled the scene in the first trimester. C. was quite obese and spent a lot of her free time reading romance novels and truly believing that Tom Selleck would be carting her away at some point. The other C. had been having sex with her boyfriend since she was 12 and swore that nothing would happen because he always pulled out. I remember hearing that when we were in junior high and thinking, 'oh. oh my. wow. that's a disaster waiting to happen. Maybe I should be having sex, too'. I waited until Christmas Eve of my senior year, and that was just fine. Respectable boy. Now a prof at a university in San Francisco. Articulate and socially far above me. Still kind.

My music friends were cool, but fucked up as aspiring poseur artistes typically are. The macho senior, T., who had a full beard, a muscled body, and who finally came out of the closet after breaking my heart and those of H. and C. and J.. After high school, R. moved to the Southeast with J., then later moved back to our hometown and is back in my life, for which I am grateful. H. was pissed because T. used to take me home, get us drunk and make out with me. Probably thought I was a boy; so many people have. (Not really, but I am handy and handsome, the two qualities that'll get me into the Possum Lodge.)

That's what my people are: handsome. My grandmother was a raven-haired beauty, as far as I'm concerned, with her black waves and blue eyes and olive skin. Vikings, Rome, reindeer herders; it all came together in a native Sami/European mix that was striking. I've seen a picture of only one of my grandmother's six sisters, and she had the same coloring, though a much more round face and darker eyes.

All the unrefined, blubbery-nose, strawberry-pored stuff came from the Swedish side, but that's where I got my eyes. My grandfather Sven had a square jaw, almost gaunt facial planes and high cheekbones to die for, and those coveted and much-noticed luminous wolf eyes. In the picture I'm thinking of he looks like Christopher Plummer as Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music. His mother had the big nose. So did most of his brothers, those men with the mellifluous names: Fredolf, Gunnar (goo-nar), Julius (yoo-lius), Ivar (ee-var), Gustav, and Axel.

Together, my genetic ancestry has come together to make me this person: short, brown-haired, high cheekbones, square jaw, strongly muscled, striking blue eyes with the black ring around the iris that takes people aback the first time they see it, easily tanned, prone to heavy work rather than sprinting, a tendency to store ridiculous amounts of body fat against a Finnmark winter, round upturned nose that I finally discovered came from my Sami side (hated the piggy thing until then).

I have spent a lot of time trying to show people what I can do, because somewhere I picked up that it's the way to acceptance. It's not my looks they're going to notice first, though Bond told me my ass has always done it for him. Look, I'm smart, the small person says; I know two languages and snippets of three or four others, I pick up on everything, I can sail, fix my car, ride a motorcycle. Not eclectic enough to spark your interest? I aced Anthro Linguistics, I write computer code, and I know the Sumerian phrase meaning "university". I can say "get the cow out of the kitchen" in Brunei-Malay. I am a sign-language interpreter. When I was three, I could count to ten in Finnish. Not so good in math, but decent, with a killer grasp of spatial concepts.

I cook. I have intuition that way, but I seldom cook because making that elaborate effort for just myself is ridiculous beyond belief. I hate to waste food so I eat Lean Cuisines (it's lean, it's cuisine) and yogurt and toast with New Zealand Airborne clover honey. I want a family to cook for, whatever permutation comprises family. Just a nice dinner a few times a week. Sunday breakfast.

I don't garden, but wish I knew how. Ditto for speaking Norwegian, playing the guitar, using GarageBand, writing music, and riding a sport bike.

Yeah, the anxiety gets the better of me on about 2 days a month. That's what meds are for.

I search for the situation that will soothe me, and realize that the soothing can't come from location or housing or money. It's my own cognitive stuff I have to work out. I do know I want to have a cabin in the woods. I do know I want someone to care for, because I have this continent of giving inside me that needs a home.

Can anyone relate?