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Ken, School is moving right along. I've picked up a new course this year, Writer's Workshop. I love it. I get to write along with the kids and encourage them to try and grow through their writing. We somehow got onto the topic of "first love" (amazing for an all boy school)so I challenged them to write about it. Then I took on my own challenge. I must have written 8 pages, most of it humor remembering discovering the difference between boys and girls, before I could finally start to open up and deal with it realistically. Anyway, since I use a device of music that you and I heard as we were growing up and since you and I grew up in the same innocent times I thought I'd share it with you. Hope you like it........Forrest.
After receiving and reading this interesting story, I thought my friends would enjoy it also. I got Forrest permission to place it on my web-site, so read and enjoy. It is about eight pages long, but I know most of you will be able to identify with his experience.......Ken.
A TRIBUTE TO OLD STANDARDS
I don’t know what it is about “old standards,” that cannon of American popular music from the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s, that’s so appealing to me. Maybe it has to do with growing up with the music of Rosie the Riveter and the GI’s. You see, World War II swallowed up my family and I was born in the very middle of it. The music that moved my parents, aunts and uncles, and got them through those momentous times surrounded me through my formative years.
Or maybe it was being a teen age drummer in a dance band and making money by playing those same old tunes in VFW halls, K of C fish fries, church socials and town hall New Year’s Eve parties so that my parents and their peers could party.
Or maybe it’s the universality of it; the pure joy of listening as Dinah Washington puts soul to a Johnny Mercer tune, or Sinatra smoothes the edges on an Ellington melody. All I know is that there’s a place in my heart that responds to a kickin’ drummer sneaking in a riff on Ella Fitzgerald as she swings Gershwin, or the lump in my throat when I hear the pain Stan Getz’ sax locates in the blues.
The music goes with me wherever I am. I hum it, I whistle it, I feel it, I think in it and I measure the moments of my life to its uneven rhythms, its compelling melodies, its haunting lyrics. So it came to me as no surprise that a couple of old standards entered my consciousness one winter evening in Alexandria, Virginia five years ago.
I looked out the hotel window and pondered Duke Street seven floors below. A stream of cars skidded and slid along in the general direction of Old Town as the blizzard continued to swirl. “This keeps up and there’s no way I’m flying out of National tomorrow,” I thought.
I put a couple of cubes into a tumbler and poured myself a scotch. One more meeting tomorrow and this trip would be over and I could get back home. I sat on the couch, took a sip, and opened the novel I’d been hoping to get to for at least a week. I’d been stuck here three days, long enough to fiddle with the radio until I found a station that played jazz, usually slow ballads plinked out by unfamiliar pianists. But now some wag of a disc jockey was responding to the weather. Vintage Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle poured out of the speaker, hot brass and his stylish voice proclaiming, “What do I care how much it may storm? I’ve got your love to keep me warm.” I appreciated the joke as well as the old standard. I tried to return to the book, but in seconds the song took me back to January of 62, Ohio State University and the first time I knew I was in love.
I can’t remember who threw the first snowball. We stood off a few feet, scooping up the fresh snow as fast as we could and tossing it at one another. Sometimes we didn’t even bother to pack the stuff, but simply picked up an arm full of soft white and let it fly. A fine mist, cold and wet, settled on our faces, a cleansing, refreshing sensation. We laughed and shouted. She caught me bent over, my bare neck exposed, and tossed a hand full. I felt a drip start at my collar and continue down my back in a breath-stealing slide. We wrestled on the soft white carpet, rolling around, laughing harder and harder until we simply rested on our backs and looked up into the thickening storm. Our gloved hands sought each other out and we lay there, staring at the swirling snow against the black sky, letting it fall on our faces, quietly taking it all in.
I hadn’t been thinking snowball fight three hours earlier as I looked out the window of my dorm room. I was simply anxious to be with her. The light, what little of it there was on this gray day, was fading from the western sky. The trees were bare, the ground a dull tan. Bits of trash, pushed along by unseen winds, rattled around the edges of the quad. Tall, billowy clouds were building overhead. I showered, shaved, splashed some English Leather on my face, slipped into a pair of khaki trousers, picked out my favorite shirt, a Gant white oxford cloth with alternating pin stripes of green, burgundy and gold, then topped it with a navy blue v neck sweater. I stepped out the back entrance and headed across the expanse of the parking lot, straight toward Canfield Hall and Maureen.
I called her room and then stood around looking lost with the other males. Mo soon bounded out holding her chemistry text and a spiral bound notebook. She wore gray wool slacks and a bright red turtleneck sweater. Her blond hair curved about her long neck in a smooth pageboy, part of a new look she’d taken on over Christmas break, a look that only made her prettier in my point of view. Her big smile and twinkling eyes highlighted her oval face.
“Hold on while I put on my scarf. Where we going?” She asked. Her voice was unique. A youthful, strange, voice, neither high nor low, it was always soft when beginning a word or sentence but gained a distinctive edge by the end. It was not a pretty voice when I think about it rationally, but I had grown use to it, heard it in my thoughts and dreams and was comforted by its familiar ring in my ears.
“Let’s go up to the house and study and then grab a couple beers at the ‘Berg.”
“You got it mister.” And with that she turned and stepped toward the door, her long legs leading us out of the dorm.
The sky had turned black. A cold wind pushed the damp air in coat grabbing swirls, nudging us along as we headed east. I tucked my history book inside my gloved right hand, and clasped her smooth hand with my bare left.
“I’ve got to go over my chem lab notes. The course is so demanding but I love my lab instructor. He’s from Australia and speaks with a wonderful accent.”
“I don’t know how you stand it. I hated chemistry. Memorize this. Memorize that. I couldn’t do it.”
“Yes you could Matt. I could help you. You just don’t want to.”
“Maybe. Hey, after rush, let’s go home for a weekend. We could catch the Chaminade game, maybe see a few friends we didn’t get to see at Christmas.”
“You go ahead. I’ll be too busy then, getting settled in the sorority...if I get picked by one...I’m just not ready to go back.”
“Well, I’d like to see the game.”
“Why? You’re in college now.”
“I know, but I still have friends there, I still follow the teams. Don’t you get curious to know what’s going on with the Lumberjacks?”
“The happiest day of my life was the day I left Oakwood High School.” I was surprised by the intensity in her voice. “I never want to go back there again.”
“What? You never told me that before. Why?”
“You have no idea what that place was like Matt. The academics were fine. I’m glad I experienced that part, but the rest was awful. Everything depended on where you lived and how much money your parents made. People were constantly putting you under the microscope to see if you measured up. Other than Lynn, I don’t care if I ever see any of my classmates again.”
The conversation ended awkwardly. We came to the little opening between the Student Union and the Natural History Museum, passed between the two buildings and then stepped into the neon and traffic of High Street.
The conversation picked up again. Maureen talked about the girl in the room across from her who spent each night listening to a syrupy album by The Lettermen and crying for her boyfriend back home in Maple Heights. We passed Long’s Book Store and Charbert’s hamburger joint before reaching the front lawn of the fraternity house.
“I’m really excited about rush tomorrow. My grades should really help. I just hope I find a house I like.”
“I don’t get it. Sorority rush seems so petty compared to fraternity rush.”
“You’re just mad because you won’t get to see me for two weeks, not until it’s all over.”
Small talk. Just sharing the day with each other. Just walking on the campus feeling free and independent and grown up. Just being in love.
We walked up the long steps and into the front room. We had the whole first floor to ourselves. One or two brothers stopped to say “Hi” or make some sarcastic comment about pledge weenies before going out the front door.
We sat in separate chairs. She poured over her notes, flipping the spiral bound pages back and forth. I slumped down in a thick burgundy leather wing back, reading intently about the rise of the middle class in Europe from my used copy of Henry Bamford Parks’, History of the World. I was growing agitated at the yellow highlighted pages, wondering what simpleton had ruined the book, at times covering the entire page in watery, yellow stain, usually highlighting the insignificant instead of the significant.
The night passed quietly until she looked up at the window. “Look, it’s snowing!” She said as she hurried to the view. There was that hint of little girl, that unexpected timbre to the words. I walked over to stand behind her, my nose picking up the sweet, flowery scent of White Shoulders, rising from her neck. I wrapped my long arms around her. I felt her head lean back ever so slightly to rest in the crook of my shoulder. Together we gazed into the blue-white globe of light beneath the street lamp and watched the dance of the first few flakes. Before our eyes the flakes turned from a few dancers into a running torrent of thick white spots.
I stood there taking in her aura. Feeling the soft rise and fall of her breath in my arms, sensing the beating of my own heart, and thinking of nothing in the world but this person, this moment.
“Come on,” she said, “let’s walk around in it.” There it was. That playful tone, the funny voice that I so enjoyed. We quickly wrapped ourselves up, put the books away and stepped into the storm. It was sticking to everything. The street, the grass, the trees and bushes were already outlined in soft white. The roofs of cars were beginning to loose their sharp edges, smoothing into air streamed gumdrop shapes. We walked along, the fat flakes splatting on reddened cheeks, leaving a short, delightful sting. We stopped and I pulled her to me, our lips joining in a long, deep kiss. I could feel the cold, damp skin of both our faces and the scratchy edges of her woolen scarf. We stood apart, raised our arms into the soft, polka dotted sky, laughed at the wonder and feel of it all and then joined in another long kiss.
We walked past the other fraternity and sorority houses, enjoyed the sight of the bright neon of High Street reflected by the white, listened to the crunch of tires on untouched patches of snow, heard the high pitched whir as a tire spun in frustration on fresh made ice.
It was our world to admire. The other students remained inside the bars, restaurants and theaters, leaving us alone to drink it all in. We walked on past the closed shops, their bright windows continuing to beckon to customers: two drug stores, a smoke shop, a record store, a bakery, a five-and-dime, two more bookstores, and then a jewelry store featuring displays of class rings and engagement rings. There we stopped and pondered when we might be in the market for a diamond.
We left the glitz and noise of High Street, returning to the quiet of Iuka and the dark where we could kiss again free from prying eyes.
That’s when the snowballs started flying. Now I was wet and cold and warm with love. My sides ached from laughing, but it was time to end the walk.
I stood up, and reached down for her hand. She turned her head to the side, looked at me with her big eyes, and said in a firm voice, “I’ve never been so in love before.”
I could only nod an acknowledgment but the words went to my heart, a tingly, exciting feeling that said all I needed to know about acceptance and self worth. I pulled her to her feet and then we retreated to the Phi Delt house.
We dried and thawed out, studied some more, stole a kiss here and there and wished for the spacious front seat of ol’ Green Bean, the 55 Chevy sedan my parents let me use at home. At 12:30 we bundled up again, grabbed our books and began the walk back to her dorm. We found a dark corner outside Commerce College, the walls shielding us from the wind while we smothered each other in kisses, our bodies rubbing tightly against each other. I could feel her soft, feminine figure despite the layers of heavy cloth. We emerged, and continued on before a final good night kiss and taking vows of, “I love you,” outside the dorm doorway.
I walked back to Park Hall oblivious to the world around me, the snow, the shouts of other men, the fear struck voices of coeds coming in mere minutes too late for curfew, the love and beer drugged careless drivers in the parking lot. I entered the dorm in a self-absorbed glow. The events of the night ran through my mind. Time and time again I saw her head turn, heard her voice, heard that new tone to it as she said, “I’ve never been so in love before.” Johnny Mathis’ voice swirled inside my head, “...look at me, I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tree...” I could sense nothing more than Maureen. I could imagine nothing more in my life than being with her, talking to her, holding her, an endless love song that would be our life together.
The phone rang. Bringing me back to Alexandria. It was my wife. She’d just been watching the news. “It’s perfectly clear here in Cincinnati but CNN said several airports are closed in the East.”
“Yeah, it’s really blowing up a storm. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
We talked on for a few minutes. I missed her. It would have been great to snuggle with her in front of the fireplace, have a glass of Merlot, and listen to Ol’ Blue Eyes croon, “I’ve got my love to keep me warm.”
“Let’s hope for the best. Miss you, Love you.” The call ended and I took another sip of scotch and looked back at the same page I’d started on an hour earlier. The disc jockey was mellowing things out for the evening. Tony Bennet was talking to the bartender, his gravely voice imploring, ”So set ‘em up Joe, I got a little story you oughta know…” I heard myself sigh. I went back to that snowy night on the lawn of the Phi Delt house at Ohio State. “Go on with it,” I ordered, “Think about the rest of it.”
The game ended around 3:30 in the afternoon. We walked through the slush filled parking lot east of the stadium. Lucas and Havlicek had destroyed a good Boilermaker team. They were ready for the upcoming NCAA tournament. As we walked along something odd was going on. She was distant. She didn’t want to hold hands.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Really nothing.” But she looked away as she answered.
“What do you want to do tonight?”
“Tonight? You didn’t say anything about tonight. You just asked me to the basketball game. I’ve got a date for tonight.”
We walked on in silence.
The last ten weeks had seen a dramatic turn around in our relationship. It had started with her going through sorority rush, a two-week process that made contact all but impossible.
I took advantage of the free time to acquire mononucleosis. At first I thought I had the flu, but it dragged on for weeks. To make matters worse I had signed up for 19 credit hours, a difficult task for someone organized and determined, but I was neither one of those. I called home.
“Dad, I got the word from student health. They ran a blood test. It’s mono. They tell me I need rest. They can give me a note that will allow me to drop any or all of my courses.”
“Nonsense. You can go to class, study and get your rest. You don’t quit. You hear me? You don’t quit and you don’t drop courses. You put your nose to the grind stone and you stick it out.”
I stayed. I lost ten of the 150 pounds that made up my bony frame and my pants began to droop as I walked. I would go to bed, sleep for 10 hours and wake up tired. I missed a ton of classes, even my favorite, Western Civilization. The military history instructor at ROTC, my only class with mandatory attendance, called me in to lock my heels and chew me out. I arrived with rings under my eyes, a runny nose and a cough that rattled. The kind captain took one look at me and simply said, “Oh, I see. Well, take care of yourself and get back on a regular schedule.”
Maureen pledged. It was a house I hadn’t heard much about, but then I didn’t talk much about greek life with anybody. I went to her winter formal just as mono was beginning to settle in. I saw less and less of her as she saw more and more of the library and the sorority house.
The end of the quarter approached and I began to feel better. I scrambled to try and catch up in classes but it wasn’t easy. There were gaps in the courses that I couldn’t fill in. In some classes I had missed so much that nothing said in lecture made any sense to me. I was beginning to dread the approach of finals. That’s when the incident following the basketball game took place.
After the first final I knew I was in trouble. I gamely played out the string and headed back to Dayton hoping that during the week I could at least figure out what was going on in my love life.
But spring break didn’t seem to include time together. My mood and my grades began to match Dayton’s weather, bleak and cold. One more quarter like this one and I’d be asked to think about doing something else for a while.
Maureen had been hard to get a hold of during the break. She took two days to interview for a summer job at a camp near Canfield, Ohio. She left early to attend the wedding of a sorority sister, adding another day to her time away. She seemed to enjoy our phone conversations, but she begged off on offers to go out citing a need to get certain unspecified work done. I had filled the void in beer drinking bull sessions with former classmates and playing basketball at Grassen’s barn for hours at a time. A sense of dread was forming in my mind but I had not allowed it to settle in. I took hope in the fact that we had both set aside Saturday as special.
We started out going to the Little Art Theatre, a small neighborhood house that featured foreign movies. A tweedy, bearded, jazz loving crowd kept the place alive and interesting. We laughed through an Alec Guiness comedy filled with sight gags, puns and stereotypes and then left to hit Kramer’s, a beer-and-burgers dive favored by University of Dayton students.
The place was packed. A basketball game blared out from a TV set perched above the bar. Black, white and gray figures scrambled frantically across the screen. Only a few of the older clientele seemed to pay attention to the action. People huddled in groups, smoking, taking pulls on brown bottles of beer, talking and laughing in a rising cacophony that all but drowned out the game. A cloud of cigarette smoke hung about the ceiling. The smell of hot, greasy hamburgers, fries and stale beer clung to every inch of the place. We ordered, grabbed our beers and found a corner to sit and talk.
“Great movie!” She laughed, “I loved the bit with the daffodil and taking the patient’s temperature. I thought I’d about die when I saw him lying there, face down on the gurney, with the flower coming out his bottom.”
She said, “Bottom.” Not butt, certainly not ass. That was classic Maureen. It wasn’t a contrived innocence. It wasn’t some Sunday school, “I’m better than you” attitude. She didn’t turn red or raise a fuss when others told dirty jokes or used strong language. It was just her way, one more thing I appreciated about her. I also realized that her voice was back again in my ears, that sweet, innocent tone settling on me and calming my fears, giving me the confidence to continue talking.
“I’m going to have to get serious this quarter. 19 hours and mono just about killed me. I just felt so tired; all I wanted to do was sleep. Dad didn’t say much except to remind me that if I flunk out I’ll have to get a job and pay rent.”
“You can do it Matt. You have to believe in yourself. I know you can do it.”
Kind words, but I noted the absence of the offer of help. “Fair enough,” I told myself. “She didn’t create the problem with grades. You did. She’s telling you she’s going on through college whether you decide to make it or not.”
Our food arrived and we ordered another round. The talk shifted to mutual friends and we caught each other up on the news. She laughed her wonderful laugh. Her eyes had that shine. Her blond hair remained soft and inviting and her smile was constant. I thought that maybe the cloud that hovered over us had gone away.
We finished our food, took a final swig of beer and headed back into the rain. She sidled over to the middle of Green Bean’s front seat, patted my hand and rested her head on my shoulder for a few seconds while I wheeled the car around the parking lot and out onto Wayne Avenue. Minutes later we pulled into her driveway. The porch light glared from its post next to the door, assuring us that her parents were upstairs asleep. We kissed a few times. No tongue. Nothing passionate, but nothing suggesting a lack of interest either. Then she pulled away. “I’ve still got to pack for tomorrow. It’s going to be a long day so I better go in.”
The rain, which had fallen steadily all night, chose now to turn into a raging torrent. “I’ll get out on your side,” she announced. We sprinted for the big porch in front of the white frame house. I opened the aluminum storm door and she quickly found her key. I anticipated a few final kisses in the living room. She fumbled with the key, unusual for her. She seemed to have an infallible ease with everything she did in life’s constant business. Then she turned toward me in the narrow space between the doors, her face looking down, something she never did. She had unlocked the front door, but she hadn’t stepped inside. It was opened only a single, uninviting foot, the warm glow of a living room lamp reaching out through the small opening. “Matt, I have to tell you something but I don’t know how to say it.”
I felt a hole appear in my stomach. A feeling shot through me, something new and different that I had never experienced before, a feeling I realized had been harboring itself inside me for some time. Now these simple words and gestures had turned it loose. I must have had the look of a deer facing the headlights of an oncoming car. The rain beat down on the roof of the porch like the roll of a drum announcing the fate of the man standing on the scaffold.
Her head came up. Her eyes had lost their gleam. Tears welled up and drops coursed across her soft, pink cheeks. “I don’t love you anymore.”
It was a different voice, a woman’s voice, a voice that had lost that hint of innocence and play. A voice I did not recognize as Maureen.
But hit, my God did it HIT!
I imagined that Mike Santoro, the toughest kid in junior high, had just blasted me with a fist to the stomach. My whole body collapsed into my gut. I shivered. I looked into her face, hoping to see it change. I listened for that old voice, hoping to hear her take these words back. She had put her long, smooth fingers over her mouth as if to keep it from saying anything more, as if to punish a part of her that had done something terribly mean. Her eyes let loose in a flood of tears. They spilled over her fingers and down her cheeks. Her whole face was wet. Her head and shoulders bobbed up and down in short, difficult breaths. I heard a sob squeeze out from her throat.
I stood there dumbfounded, unable to react. Words would not find their way to my tongue. Her face began to blur and I realized that my own tears were starting. I said nothing. A cry tore from my throat, its path a searing, hot slice as if an assassin’s knife cut from the back of my mouth straight to my heart. I turned and half ran, half stumbled, to the car. I pulled open the door, clumsily pulled at my coat pocket for the keys.
“Matt!” I heard her scream and it was yet another voice. There was anguish in its sound, a suggestion of regret. “Matt, come back, please come back!”
I couldn’t. I gave the ignition a mean twist, felt the big V 8 come to life, felt the assuring vibration of the running motor. I started to slam the gearshift lever into reverse, put the pedal down hard and blast out of the drive, but then I stopped. I rested my forehead on the steering wheel, between my hands. I let the cry come out. I let the hot tears pour from my eyes, heard them land hard upon my coat. I sat like that, letting it all come up and shake me, burn my throat, twist my stomach. I felt myself convulse and gasp for air, struggle to gain control, then convulse again. It took agonizing minutes until I could calm down and see straight. Then I placed my right foot on the brake, put the car in reverse, and backed out onto the street.
She stood in the doorway watching it all and crying along with me. Her shoulders slumped, her arms hung at her sides. I thought to pull over and run back but I knew the truth had been spoken. There was nothing more to say. Once those words were out, once I connected them to the weeks of her avoiding behavior, I knew that love was gone.
I drove on. The slap of windshield wipers, the droning taps of rain on the metal roof, the sound of splashing water being squeezed from beneath the tires were all that entered my ears. There was no Johnny Mathis, no “...the sound of your ‘hello’, that music I hear...” no soaring violins, no sense of timelessness.
My world tumbled and jostled. Hot flames tore at my throat, poked my eyes, and made my chest feel hollow and pained. I did not know what to do, what to say, what to think. I was lost in the cold and wet of this long night. I heard Bennet’s voice finish the story, “…we’ve come to the end of a brief episode. So make it one for my baby and one more for the road.”
The radio brought me back to Virginia. Linda Ronstad’s melancholy voice caught my attention. “My old flame. I can’t even think of his name…”
“Her name,” I corrected, “and the problem is I can think of her name. Her name and everything else about her.” I finished the last of the scotch, closed the book, stood up and stretched.
“All these years and it still hurts. Why?” I asked myself an all too familiar question as I brushed my teeth, pulled back the covers and entered the empty queen size bed.
I heard the traffic dealing with the storm outside and stared at the pitch-black ceiling. I went back to spring of 62. What had happened? Back at school I talked to buddies. I talked to mutual friends. She kept out of sight and said nothing to anyone. I went into denial. She hadn’t said, “I don’t love you anymore.” She’d said something else, something not quite so final. Pride kept me from asking her out, but love forced me to keep on calling her. She was seldom in. On the rare occasions I did get through she was friendly, but she always limited any time spent together. I went back and forth in fits of longing and unbridled hate; all of it pushed along by pain. I felt empty, alone, deceived.
I pondered the situation long into sleepless nights. Over and over I asked myself, “What happened?” Was it because I was a failure? Did she look at my winter quarter grades and figure, “This guy’s going nowhere.” Had she found someone else? My spies told me no. Was she looking for someone more romantically aggressive? Hey, I could do that. I kept my hands off of her out of respect, not out of a lack of desire or curiosity, but I could be that other guy if that would bring her back.”
All the thinking and fretting went for naught. I never found out. I don’t know if an answer would have helped. I do know that I couldn’t let go of my feelings for her. I couldn’t let go of the pain and I could not let go of the anger. There are times when I wonder if I ever have or ever will.
25 years later I tracked her down in Centerville. I was back in Dayton for a conference. I called her out of the blue and asked her if she’d join me for a beer and burger afterwards. As a pretense I told her I was doing research for a book I wanted to write about college and Vietnam. I needed to hear about those events from the female point of view. She showed up and we began talking like long lost friends. She’d gone through a nasty divorce with a real horse’s ass of a guy. She was raising two teenage girls and trying to get back into the work force. She’d put on a few pounds but she still had that same unique voice, the same pretty face and the blonde pageboy.
I asked her about Vietnam. What had she thought? Did she follow the story? Did anyone tell her that I was in ‘Nam?
“Matt I’m sorry. I had two kids to raise and a husband with a roving eye. I was too busy to think much about it. I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you more.”
I leaned over my beer and pressed home my real questions. “Can you tell me now what happened? I mean do you ever stop and think, ‘I wonder what would have happened if he and I had stayed together?”
“Of course, Matt.”
God, I heard that voice and my name together again and my heart was back in my throat.
She continued, “I drive by your parents’ house sometimes on the way to work and I wonder.”
“Mo I gotta know. I can’t tell you how much it hurt, how long it took to get over. Can’t you tell me why?”
She sat back in the booth. Her face began to take on that look I’d seen on the porch in March of ’62, just before she’d said, “I don’t love you anymore.” Then she caught herself, took a sip of beer and looked me in the eye. “I don’t know Matt. You have to remember I was only 17 when we left for school. What did I know about love?”
“Not good enough Mo. Was it someone else? Was it me? What happened?”
“I don’t know Matt. I just don’t know. It just happened.”
It seems strange to me that I can’t just put the thoughts, the questions, and the memories away in a drawer somewhere and forget. I did recover. I did learn to love again. I’m in a wonderful, happy marriage now. I’ve got new “old standards” to listen to. Sinatra sings softly in my mind, “Love is lovelier, the second time around…” or Paul McCartney swoons, “But of all these friends and lovers, there’s no one compares to you.” But the memory of that first love still leaves a scar someplace. The memory comes back at odd moments, I hear myself sigh and I feel a bittersweet pain. My best conclusion is that she just couldn’t bring herself to say, “I thought you were a loser. I was growing and you were staying back in Fairmont and Dayton and I wanted to move on.”
Whatever.
I know I still think about it and I still wonder how different my life would have been.
© FORREST BRANDT, October 26, 1999
