Yesterday I was sixteen. Today I’m in my sixties. In my drinking days an old boy would saunter into the Legion and stop at the end of the bar where my friend Max and I would hold forth after work. We would invariably have a cigarette in our hand as we sipped a glass of Pabst. He would stick that device in his hand up to his throat and croak out something like, “I used to smoke cigarettes, they’re not good for you. Look what they did to me? You should quit.” We’d give him a dirty look and he’d go on down to the other end of the bar. Max was dead in a year at age 61. I quit drinking the next year. I smoked another 10 years and quit. 

When you’re young you know everything. You don’t need to listen to people who have been there done that. Today kids don’t smoke, they sit and look at a thing in their hand called a ‘device’. I suppose that’s better for you. I remember the first cigarette I ever smoked. I knew it was dumb and I knew I was making a lifelong decision. I was actually a bit of an athlete when I started at 15. Within a few years that was gone. I had a choice and chose the wrong path. With my later love for running after I had dropped all the bad habits, it would always make me wonder, “What could my physique and endurance be if I had stayed on the jock path?” 

The next year after I started smoking I was 16. Still a jock. I noticed a young lady in school from the neighboring town. Noticed isn’t the right word, thunderstruck was more accurate. I’d never seen anything like her. She came into classes a few minutes after they started to pick up the attendance reports from the teacher. She obviously had her stuff together, they only let good students pick up the extra credit to be teacher assistants or aides or whatever they were called. She was a freshman when I was a junior. But I quickly found out who she was by looking at the previous year’s Yearbook. 

I was thoroughly amazed by her the next two years. She gave me opportunity after opportunity to ‘make my move‘. I could not pull the trigger. I dated a handful of times in high school. I was certainly no Romeo. I was extremely stunted around girls for the longest time. My family had teased me mercilessly about girls since early grade school. They had assumed since I was a cute kid that I was tearing it up with the opposite sex. Little did they realize or care that what they had done was stunt my natural social development. 

Not wanting to use her real name, I’ll call her ‘Julie‘. It certainly wasn’t just a sexual lust either. She just struck me as perfect in every way. If ever there was a case of ‘love at first sight‘, that was it. Maybe what she did as a teacher’s aide gave her a few bucks. I’d always kind a wondered. She’d had this high-necked, long sleeve sky blue dress that she wore for a couple of years. It was just beautiful, and it still fit perfectly (sort of), but the incredible physique she was developing threatened every thread in it. She was also a dancer in the school’s drill team, and I noticed she didn’t have the same white uniform blouse as the other girls. Maybe she couldn’t afford it?

One of the ways she tried to make it easy on me was when she sent her sister (who was a grade above me) to check me out. Jada comes and plops down next to me in the Student Rec Center and strikes up a conversation with me. All I had to do was talk to her sister, show her I wasn’t a serial killer, and show her my undying love for Julie. And I couldn’t do it. It was starting to become clear in my retarded brain, that although I had thought she would never be able tell my soul burned for her, and that my love was a secret, it turns out women can tell when they are being looked at. They have “guy-dar“. They can tell from 50 yards away when a guy is looking at them. I don’t know how they do it. 

The next year, my senior year, was the most blatant of all. It was springtime March or April and graduation was barreling down at me. She knew this. We were waiting in the student activities center waiting for the buses to take us kids home who had had after school activities, mine was tennis. She sets it up with her friend to have a fake “fall” going after a ball and she lands literally at my feet. The normal guy would have said, “Julie! Are you alright??” And proceeded to help her up and see if she was okay. Thereby starting a conversation. 

Not me. I was too petrified. A month later and its Senior Day. Our last day of classes. My friends and I were running the halls as the derelicts we were having a running squirt gun fight. Julie comes out of a classroom and literally bumps into me. We look at each other, and we both know. On the last day in the last hour that I will ever be in that school. When I am heading out to “become an adult”, I don’t have the courage to talk to her. I am so young and so stupid, I don’t have the sense to grasp what I am passing up. God, fate and Julie had given me every chance there was. 

I know I will never see her again. She knows it too. I can tell. And today, in a month or two (if I can find out when) will be my 45^th  Class Reunion. I say that simply as a warning to young people that will not be heard. I realize “you have forever in front of you!” But you don’t. Don’t take the wrong path. You know what’s right and what’s wrong. Don’t put off till tomorrow, what you can grab today. And the important things in the end will be that woman, and those kids. Cherish them. The most beautiful woman in the world (that also loves you), does not come along every day. Don’t let her pass you by. 

[It took me 45 years to figure out what it was about that blue dress she had. It made her eyes ‘pop’, because they were blue too. Two years later I found out from a friend’s younger brother that was in Julie’s class, they had figured out what I saw when she was a freshman. They had made her Homecoming Queen her senior year. She was the most beautiful girl in that school. And the nicest. I realized in my next post on this subject I wanted to attempt to tackle the secret to finding that life long relationship success, and not grabbing onto failure.]