Tag Archives: regret

Atonement

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Music has always been part of my life: a blessing; a balm; sometimes a curse. A local radio station pretentiously calls Baby Boomer classics “the soundtrack of our lives.”  The pieces that have augmented my existence are less well-known: the B sides; the obscure tunes once heard only on late night radio, nurturing our ears and caressing our souls.

One of those songs is “Triad”, from Jefferson Airplane’s album Crown of Creation. It begins with two acoustic guitar chords, inevitably triggering this memory. Cue up the track here before you read further.

Summer 1975. I see my 12th floor dorm room at the University of Illinois. There is no one else around—they’ve left for the summer—and even I’m not there. The lamp on my desk provides warm but incomplete illumination. Out of the window, in the west, I see the street lights along Florida Avenue and the silhouette of the Assembly Hall, a giant, concrete flying saucer just south of Memorial Stadium.  Beyond that, in the darkness, a slowly pulsating red light on a distant transmission tower.

The second guitar comes in with a haunting melody and the scene fades to midday along a long, straight stretch of two-lane blacktop. A lonely FINA gas station sits on south side, along the edge of the cornfields. A railroad track runs parallel to the highway on the north side. The road disappears into the heat waves rising in the distance. It could be any two-lane anywhere on the prairie, but this is U.S. 36 between Decatur and Springfield. I’m going to meet my girlfriend’s parents with a mix of anticipation and fear.

You want to know how it will be
Me and her, or you and me.

Her family lives in a tired, Depression-era house with Frank Lloyd Wright moldings on the upper window panes that have been painted over several times.. Her father is an alcoholic whose mind is now that of a prize fighter punched in the head one time too many. He greets me with a grunt, trying to be cordial, but won’t look me in the eye. Her mother is a woman with black hair whom I could imagine in years past wearing one of those frilly 1950s aprons with an old, heavy stainless-steel iron with the black plastic handle and the braided cord with the round plug, smiling while ironing the laundry, a regular Suzy Homemaker. But her face is taut, having been hardened by a life she would not have deliberately chosen. It was her lot and she stayed with it. That’s what you did back then.

Her father doesn’t like me because I’m the wrong color. “Why couldn’t you have found a nice white boy?” he asked her after I left. Her mother doesn’t like me because we’re sleeping together. “I don’t like how you live,” is how she framed it. It doesn’t matter that I’m planning on going to medical school. I declare my love and devotion to her daughter but she seems to know better. Later I will contemplate awkward holiday family gatherings and realize she is right. Despite that, she sincerely thanked me when I called a few years later to let her know her daughter’s tonsillectomy went well.

Your mother’s ghost stands at your shoulder
Face like ice — a little bit colder
Saying to you — “you cannot do that, it breaks
All the rules you learned in school.”

I ask her to marry me during my first year in medical school and give her my mother’s old engagement ring, the one my father, long deceased, gave her. She picks out a wedding dress and models it for me. It truly is a fairy tale, but I am totally incapable of keeping the promise I’ve made. I’ve not yet confronted my own demons and will betray her. Through tears of anger and unspeakable pain she will rage, “You had yourself a virgin!”

Did we love each other? Or were we just looking for the love and affirmation missing from both our lives?

Four decades later, in the shadow of my eventual mortality, the guilt surprises me and I try to atone for the sins of my youth. I am not alone. Others have confessed their own transgressions to me – relationships condemned by immaturity, selfishness or fate. We all seek absolution but there are no do-overs in life, no path to penance. We can only acknowledge our trespasses against others and move on.

I’ve thought of apologizing to her, but would I be doing it for her or for me? I will never know. for some things are best left undisturbed.

Unrequited Love

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In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.
From “Locksley Hall” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

And when very young, to that which cannot nor should ever be.
Dr. Dave

When I was in the fourth grade I had a terrible crush on Jeannie, a blond, blue-eyed girl to whom I pledged my eternal undying love. Her twin sister, Carolyn, was a gangly brunette with glasses and braces. She was in that awkward stage through which some girls are destined to suffer and just didn’t hold the same fascination. As a callous and superficial nine-year-old kid, I saw Jeannie as beauty idealized – a living Barbie doll. Which, as most of us learn as we get older, is one of the worst criteria on which to base a relationship.

In my mind I would walk her home, hand in hand, and gently brush her lips with mine before she disappeared into her house. I would protect her from the slings and arrows of playground torment. I would be hers forever, and she, mine.

The only problem was she had no idea any of this was supposed to happen. We’d never had even a brief conversation in passing because I was too terrified to say anything. The best I could hope for was catching a glimpse of her as I rode my bike past her house, which worked out only once in two years.

Donna, the only girl I ever talked to, was more like a sister to me. We’d walk the block or so to her house and talk of simple things, much like two very good friends. Many of my adult relationships with women would follow the same two separate tracks of friend or love interest, something I’ve recognized only as I write this.

I continued to pine for Jeannie during fifth grade. She liked to play jacks with the other girls (go look it up, kids) so I bought her a set for Christmas – ten little metal spikes and a small rubber ball attached to a cheap piece of cardboard. I wrapped it and the next day unceremoniously shoved the package into her hands. “Here,” I said before turning away, avoiding the inevitable rejection.

My infatuation with Jeannie was potentially far more dangerous. I knew racial differences existed in the mid-1960s – when I was five years old a playmate’s grandmother called me a “little black liar” after a minor skirmish – but I was blissfully unaware that a poor Puerto Rican kid with kinky hair had no business being even remotely interested in a nice, middle-class white girl. I did not know that less than ten years previously a young African-American boy named Emmitt Till was savagely beaten to death in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman. I might have become St. David the Naïve, martyred for stupidity, were it not for being tragically socially inept. We moved to another school district two months into sixth grade and I never saw Jeannie again.

Make me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife,
When I heard my days before me, and the tumult of my life;
Tennyson

Love may be deaf, dumb and blind, but karma has a wry sense of humor.
Dr. Dave

There was another blond girl in my new class. Anita was, as older folks would say, cute as a button: short hair; small, upturned nose; fair skin and bright, smiling eyes. Had I been paying attention I might have noticed, but avoiding further humiliation took priority.

A few days before school let out for the summer, our sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Jackson, organized a class trip to the Chiricahua National Monument, a “Wonderland of Rocks,” about two hours from Bisbee. That morning we gathered at the playground with our sack lunches where Mrs. Jackson and a few volunteer moms herded us into their cars. I felt honored to be invited into the back seat of Mrs. Jackson’s station wagon.

We headed out Route 80 to Double Adobe Road, memorable for the frequent, gut-dropping dips in the otherwise straight and boring black top. My family had made the drive a couple of times in our navy blue ’60 Chevy Biscayne, with the wide flat fins and the trunk that could hold at least a couple of bodies. My stepfather loved to take those dips at speeds far greater than the snail’s pace I was used to in town. From there we picked up US 191 North, passing through McNeal and Elfrida, then east on Arizona SR 181 until we turned on to Bonita Canyon Road and into the park.

The road rises gently for a few miles and Bonita Creek flows past the roadside picnic area where we stopped. We ate lunch, waded through the icy water and explored some of the trails. One girl cut her foot on a sharp rock in the creek and I cleaned it with alcohol I’d brought, figuring it might come in handy.

As we were getting ready to leave, Anita came up to me and, out of the blue, said, “You know, I really like you.”  As with Jeannie, we’d never spoken a word to each other (or at least that is what I remember), but now the shoe was on the other foot and I was stunned. Any flattery I might have felt was completely overwhelmed by sheer terror and I said nothing.  It’s only now that I realize my lack of response probably hurt her feelings, and for that I’m sorry.

Truly, youth is wasted on the young.

I acquired a Bisbee High School yearbook during a trip back to Arizona in 1972. Carolyn, Donna and Anita had become lovely young women. Jeannie was the All-American girl; I would not have been surprised if she’d been elected Prom Queen. Some of the guys I’d known in grade school, on the other hand, hadn’t quite gotten their edges smoothed out. Ricky, the class clown whose twin sister once yelled, “Sit down, Junior!” in class, wore sunglasses for his yearbook picture; he might have had a future in stand-up comedy.

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,
Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest.
Tennyson

What he said.
Dr. Dave

More than half a century later I can only imagine what happened to them. Maybe they all got married, had kids and grandkids, and lived happily ever after. Or maybe, like most of us, the joys were enough to withstand the inevitable pain and sadness that occasionally tests even the best relationships. I’ll never know, and some things are best left undisturbed.

But wherever you are, thanks for the memories.

Spring flowers © Can Stock Photo / sborisov