“Love heals the wounds it makes…” – Time Is A Healer; Eva Cassidy
The lyricist Diane Scanlon wrote that Eva Cassidy song, and a birthday wish from an old friend brought it to mind. I can be a “Grumpy Old Man” when it comes to social media, but it is a useful tool for people to stay in touch and reconnect, and helps me to realize that the life I imagine was one I had actually lived.
At my 25th high school reunion, a woman who sat across from me at the banquet table said, “you used to like me.” I looked at her name tag and was astonished to remember that I had, indeed, “liked” her. Not the click-of-the-button way, but the old-fashioned, grade school pining way.
She was one of my youngest loves and though how we met is lost, I do remember a birthday party where we children played spin the bottle, and I selected her to kiss and she selected me, in return. Often, and repeatedly. The assembled children began the chant, “Joni likes Tubby” (her nickname was a misnomer, a leftover from a much younger age). I was about 12 years old, and with the money I earned from a weekly paper route, I purchased candy and gifts for the person who became my girlfriend. Every single school day that we were paired, I stopped at the G.C. Murphy five-and-dime for candy. I gave it to her when I saw her at school. I did this until she told me, “I don’t like you any more.” As is still my wont, I did not ask why. I left grade school for high school and cannot recall seeing her again, until that reunion.
In high school, where hearts and hormones run wild, I met another girl and we dated for several years. During this time, after school and on the weekends, I worked at the University of Pittsburgh, in the closed stacks of the library. The money I earned went toward the purchase of my clothing and books, and again, gifts for my girlfriend.
There are couples that connected in my high school and are still married today, but despite my single-minded dedication to this girl, that did not happen to me. We had wonderful days and evenings and I marveled at the idea of being loved. But we lost emotional traction, slid sideways and separated. We remained friends, after a fashion — my family kept her in the circle — but we did not see each other for many years. We were in sporadic contact; when I was an advertising art director working in New York, her son was a fashion stylist working in Chicago, and my friend and I had a brief conversation about getting him work in “the city.”
I do not believe in the quality of the gifts that others credit me with. I showed my love in the only way I knew at that time, and pressed my gifts like a seal into the wax of understanding, with no expectation that they would survive the day. But everything counts, in some way; each time we touch one another, something changes in both the other and ourselves.
As is often the case in high school romance, we had flailed away from each other, doing some damage, but on my birthday this year, my old friend wrote this: “… I still have the ice skates you gave me for my 16th birthday, the pendant watch you gave me for Christmas; I also have the gold earrings with the black stone. I will never forget the yellow batter cakes with cherries in the middle that I made for your birthday.”
I cried.