Identity Is Our Operating System - Part 3
By Tom Kagy | 27 Jul, 2025

Our early romantic liaisons and society's response to them form another important layer of our identity formation.

Hello, this is Tom Kagy with Unconventional Wisdom.
This is part three of a series on identity formation, how experiences, people, places shape our identities. And of course, identity is our operating system.
Aside from our parents and our grandparents and our early experiences with peers, one of the most important identity-forming experiences are romantic ones. Also, the reaction of society to our romantic interests.
For me, identity began becoming an issue in my adolescence and it continued to grow in my mind into my early adulthood.
And this was the reason I had felt the need to write my novel The Summerset.
We had covered the first two chapters in the first two parts of this series. And today we're going to look at Chapter 3, which deals with a romantic interest and the reaction of society toward that romantic interest.
The Summerset, Chapter Three. It begins with a letter to Kimberly.
They were happy to see me, probably because they could inter at last the coffin that must have been putting a damper on things. Jimmy is the one most affected. For a while, he was like a zombie. I'm surprised at how different we look from each other. His features are much more like my father's.
Watching his shoulders heaving when they started tossing in the dirt, I wanted to go and hold him, but my family is undemonstrative with emotions. I didn't even hug Ma when I first saw her. We just kind of touched each other's forearms. My father gave me a hearty handshake.
I got my old lifeguard job back. I started work each morning at 10. College had ruined me for any serious leisure anyway. I couldn't sleep past 7, though I stayed up past midnight. They had moved my bed out to the porch room where the sun splashed in early through the thin curtains.
I stayed in bed and daydreamed about Kimberly or rummage through the old boxes of junk. I found things I'd forgotten about, like my comic collection and boxes of letters.
The storybook clouds piled on the horizon made the blueness supernatural. It made me ache for something more than letters.
The blue-green water was still divided by the shimmering black stripes. But along the edges, awaiting the ten o'clock whistle, menaced a squadron of kids. Beflippered and face-masked, their bodies flexed and reflexed as they watched the silver whistle twirling around Bobo's forefinger like vultures. Bobo was blonde and big-boned, with peaches and cream skin just beginning to show a tan.
Like his older sister Beth, he had clear green eyes. He squinted and waved at me. Then Bobo blew the whistle. A cascade of flailing limbs made the memory of the placid water seem a waking dream, leaving on terra firma only himself, me, and a girl reclining motionlessly on a chaise lounge. She was the other lifeguard on duty.
I sat down on a chaise beside her and began my working day. Keenan, stop jumping on people. That must have startled the girl. She pulled herself up a little. Isn't he a monster? She said, adjusting her dark sunglasses with a red manicured hand.
"Been giving you guys trouble the past few days?"
"The past twelve years!" With a quick smile, she extended her hand.
"I'm Jill Keenan, sister of the pest."
I shook her hand, or rather my hand was shaken firmly.
"You must be Robert Taratelli. Bobo's been filling me in. He told me he had to go everywhere with you and his sister."
"Not everywhere," I said.
In the morning air was the smell of straw and manure and the unmistakable promise of a scorcher. We passed small open pastures with grazing cows and started up the first set of hills. From the ridge we saw the valley of white crosses. We picked up our pace and didn't talk until the war cemetery was a good distance behind. At the mountain stream we took off our shoes and soaked our feet until they were numb.
On the high summit was a natural spire, and by some fiat of earth and sky, a flat table rock balanced on its tip.
"I'm wondering how it stays up there like that," said Beth.
"You're way ahead of me," I said, "because I still haven't figured out how they got it up there in the first place."
She threw a handful of water on my face. Growling and snorting, I buried my face into her stomach.
She shrieked and tried to pull loose. As she staggered back, she tripped, and we both splashed into a pool. After a lot of thrashing around and screaming, Beth got away.
"Guess what?" she said, buttoning her shirt quickly. "We've got company."
Two young couples loaded with camping gear had stumbled upon our midsummer madness.
After a moment of uncertainty one of the men stepped over the rocks toward us.
"Anyeonghaseyo," he said. I returned the greeting and he became at ease. He indicated the sun and wiped a sweat from his face with the towel he carried over his neck.
"I see you have already cooled yourselves off." A grin sprit across his brown, glistening face.
"The water is nice," I said, feeling foolish.
"Is she your friend?" He glanced at Beth.
"Yes." I nodded, still grinning.
"Why don't we hike up together?" He said, starting to get chummier than I wanted. The others crowded around. "At first we thought you might be American."
"What'd he say?" Beth was uncomfortable, particularly since her shirt clung transparently.
"They want to hike up with us. They think I'm Korean."
"I wish they wouldn't crowd around so much. Maybe if you tell them you're American."
"You seem to speak English well," said the man.
"I am American," I said. They were unconvinced. "My mother is Korean."
"Where were you born?"
"Here," I said, feeling my face redden. "My father was stationed here at the time."
"You spoke Korean so well." He looked away and busied himself with straps on his pack.
"What'd he say?" Beth asked.
"Just as I thought, they don't believe me." Her sympathetic gaze bothered me more than their resentment.
"Where do you live in America?" one of the Korean women.
"Los Angeles."
She turned to her friend and murmured, I caught the word, gyopo, immigrant. They were thinking I considered myself too good to be Korean, too good for Korean girls even. Why couldn't they believe I was half American?
Because I hadn't tried to snow them with English the way some people did. I was out there to enjoy nature, which was supremely indifferent to nationality, not to be cross-examined. And I was about to say so when Beth tugged at my hand.
"Tell them we'll hike up by ourselves," she said, glaring at them.
One of the men saved me the trouble by smiling stiffly and announcing that they should be hurrying on. They strode away briskly, leaving us scowling after them.
The Buddhist temple wasn't large, but it was a well-preserved specimen. The wooden beams and the inner walls swarmed with a phantasmagoria of blood red, iridescent green, and twilight blue. No hallucination could match its vividness. A bronze Buddha in the center gleamed dully, and the flickering candles sent phantoms wavering against the colors.
The musty fumes from the smoldering incense oppressed us, even though we were on the outside.
"It's beautiful and it gives me the creeps." Beth pulled me away from the chanting Buddhists. "I'd rather look at the view."
"You mean you'd rather be out in the sun where you are the view." Nastily true, but she loved it. She couldn't suppress a grin.
By the time we started down to the cable car station, the sun had cooled and Beth had warmed as much. At the base of the mountain was a resort hotel where we stopped for Harvey Wallbangers, many of them before taking a taxi to the Taemyeong Inn.
On the lifeguard chair, I felt the burning rays fall squarely on my chest and detachment. Not that I wouldn't have plunged in to save someone going down for the third time, but I was literally above everything except the tall black poplars that consorted in a row outside the pool. Divers catapulted up and briefly enjoyed my altitude until Sir Isaac's Law prevailed.
At a glance, I could take in six holes of the golf course, the officers club next door, and the mountain that loomed over Camp Walker.
Not even a whisper carried the heat from my body. After I had burnt to ashes and wafted down to the water, my soul would remain suspended over the pool until it whisked away by autumn winds. I blew the whistle.
"Everybody out of the water! Keenan, that means you too."
Beth stopped by for a swim after work. She looked a little as if she had been chain-smoking and skipping meals since I had last seen her in September. But still, in person she was prettier than in memory. My memory could be unfaithful that way. We chatted, afraid of even brief silences. Then we dove into the water that slid around our bodies like nothing.
Once we were holding on to the side and laughing about some figment of our mutual nervousness, our legs slid together. We got out soon after. After closing the pool, we went to the officers club with Bobo and Jill.
With a smile, Beth ordered a Harvey Wallbanger for me, and I hadn't the heart to change it to a Scotch Rox. We talked about who had returned this summer from college and who hadn't. Bobo was out to charm Jill. By the glow of the red lamp and the twilight blowing in from the golf course.
It wasn't hard to imagine Beth and me back into the past summer. Near the fifth green was that old willow that stooped indulgently to hide from view a spot of grass, the spot where I had stumbled across Beth's virginity one drunken night. Beth saw me looking there and smiled.
When the drinks had been finished, except my wallbanger, which had languished and gone undrunk, we wandered over to the old willow. Someone produced a couple of firm fat joints, and quietly and efficiently we got stoned. Orion's belt and the Big Dipper and Draco sprawled across the sky. I didn't want to turn to see if I really was at Santa Monica Beach with Kimberly.
"It seems like last night." The voice was soft and familiar, but it wasn't Kimberly's, and the grass prickled my skin. The birds were what had eventually sent Beth and me out to those Korean Inns. "You were such an impatient horny bastard then."
I wanted to say, do you feel safe using the past tense, Beth? But what would be the point of that? I sat up. Bobo and Jill were making out.
They had moved a little ways from us, but I could see their jaws working to draw out sweet succour. Bobo's hands roved. But for the spell of silence and custom, I would have cheered him on.
"Horny bastard," murmured Beth, and for an instant, I thought she referred to my voyeurism.
Taking her hand, I pulled her and myself up on reluctant knees. We made a slow circuit of the old familiar course, stumbling over dips and bumps, illuminated as it was by only the slivery reminder of a moon. At her door, I brushed her cheek with mine, catching a faint scent of something lost, and walked home.