Every year around the end of October, I get pensive and tend to dwell too much on the past. My mother passed away at the end of October. So every year around that time, I start taking stock of my life...
I think mostly about guys. Yeah, typical. I'm sorry I cannot report a fixation on the more profound topics like politics or religion... Nope; for me it all comes down to the dudes.
Not just any dudes, either. No -- this is the short list of Guys Who've Had Significant Influence On My Life.
Mostly, I remember one guy in particular... but this isn't just one of the guys on the Short List... no this was the Big One. The First Love guy. Every woman's romantic journey starts somewhere, and most of us mark it by the first guy we dated, or the first guy we crushed on. And that's okay. When I compartmentalize them into neat little categories I have to name Patrick Phelan as the Point A on my romantic Odyssey. Even if we were only nine at the time... and he "liked" my friend more than me. Okay, he didn't know I was alive; but let's not split hairs.
And then there was Richard. The first...okay, the ONLY, high school relationship. But that was more an experiment in endurance than anything else; the central theme being who could get out alive, through the haze of smoke (both the legal and the illicit) and the after-effects of ill-gotten beer.
No; for the real Point A in my journey of sexual awakening, I'd have to give that honor to someone I never even kissed. No, really. And I was 17 when I met him, too -- well-past the age when a kiss is any big deal.
This guy towered over me -- I'm pretty short (5'0") and he was easily 6'4. He was a lot older than me ("but well within range," my fevered teen-aged inner romantic always whispered) and he was the counselor at a private school I attended in my last year of High School.
Oh, man I fell so hard for that guy. I would dream up reasons to go and have "office time" with him... which wasn't hard to do, as I was from a pretty unstable background and lived in a youth home at the time I met him. And before I go any further let me clarify: no, "office time" isn't a euphemism for sex. (Hey, man, I'm talking spiritual stuff here...)
He was patient and kind, and listened with longsuffering endurance to my breathless ramblings... and it didn't hurt that he was gorgeous and in a band, and had longish hair, and had biceps that were cut like a lumberjack's (only without all the dirt and grime.)
Long story short, I graduated, and his band hit lean times, so I didn't see too much of him for a while.
Until I went to a small two-year college in a Dallas suburb, and in the middle of my - oh, who am I kidding, I don't remember which semester- Suffice to say, that he ended up on a construction crew on campus, the offices of which were located in a trailer which I could see right out my dorm bedroom window.
Oh, the misty-haloed fantasies the view of that trailer sparked... white steeds, armored Knight -- something along the line of Buttercup's jump from the window at the end of Princess Bride...(only, not into Andre' the Giant's waiting arms...)
I visited him every.single.day. And brought him a loaf of my homemade banana bread with me... because it was his favorite. It didn't hurt that he wore those sleeveless undershirts almost every day (Oh! I got to see so much of his skin!) due to the hot working conditions. And he looked like a bronze god from working in the sun all day... and his brown hair now had natural blonde highlights in it the likes of which would make Bon Jovi fire his hairstylist...
But... it was his soul I was falling for; no, really! It just came in a really. fine. package.
And just when I was at my absolute worst point -- too far gone for any kind of therapy-- his job ended, and he was no longer outside my dorm room window.
But that wasn't the end...
We attended the same stadium-sized church, and he was on the youth staff there. So, yeah. I saw a lot of him still... And the memory is fuzzy, yes, but I recall getting more than one phone call from him at the dorm payphone (we weren't allowed phones in our dorms).
One in particular, I'll never forget. It was when he called to tell me that he was moving on... going back home out west. I was so crushed that he was leaving, and being the stoic that I am, I couldn't let him know I would be hurt by this knowledge, so I basically told him to have a nice life, and hung up on him. Nice, huh?
I went on to dodge a couple more phone calls from him after I'd graduated and gone back to the youth home... including one in which he'd tried to tell me he was getting married. Our mutual friend filled me in, though... letting me know that his intended was the same height...had the same hair color...and even the same first name as mine...
Coincidence? Maybe. Or maybe he was just trying to bury the memory of the besotted little teen-aged girl whose attentions made him feel like Superman.
I mean, what guy doesn't want to be Superman, right?
