As I've written the stories of my childhood, I've told you about the boys: Mood, Lewie, Shaun, and Keith. There were others on the periphery, but most of them had moved on by the time some of my stories were told. There was Eric, the Egg-Head, for example. I had known him longer than I had known any of the rest. There was Shaun's friend Scott, but an auto accident with his father derailed him. Then there was the girl in the middle: Linda.
When I met Linda Marie Freeman, she was 15 years old and "going steady" with Terry "Lewie" Lewallen. If you remember anything about Terry beyond his remarkable stupidity, it was that he was, at the time, considered handsome. He could grow an impressive beard and he was fairly bulky (which is to say he looked muscular, but wasn't). Linda was not the usual sort of girl that Lewie dated, she was attractive. She wasn't a movie star, but she was cute. Rail thin with big blue eyes that peeped out from behind her glasses, Linda was, might as well say it, the first love of my life.
I don't recall how Linda and Lewie broke up, but they did and he moved on to an ugly girl with an impressive resume in the bedroom. Linda moved on to no one and it took me a long time to figure out why. She was waiting for me.
It's a strange thing to type those words now, but looking back across my life to those moments, I realize how completely clueless I was. To lift the lyrics of a song, we were waiting on our lives to start their endings; we were just children who thought they were grown. It never occurred to me that she might feel the same way about me.
I call her the girl in the middle, because in every picture of our group, there she was, in the center of us. Every day at lunch she sat at the table in the middle, directly opposite from me. She was in my default line of vision and, again, I had no idea why. I would sit there and think about how much I was in love with her and never say a word about it while she smiled back at me. I wrote reams of bad poetry, had conversations with my mirror, and dream dreams of her. In 1982 if you looked up clueless in the dictionary; there was a picture of me beside it.
I graduated High-School in May of 1983 and something in that transformative process took the boldness that I showed in every other aspect of my life and made in part of my desire for romance. I asked her out on a date. Linda and I went out many times but somewhere in my head I couldn't get around to asking her to be my girlfriend. I would meet her at work when she would get off and kiss her in the parking lot. That kept up until she was late getting home one night and her father came to check on her. She was instructed to go home right after work. Her parents didn't like me much after that.
There are three small stories left to tell before the heartache. The first was her birthday. I didn't have much in the way of money, but I wanted to show her a good time. Keith, the coward, lived in a house with cool parents and they had a half finished basement that served as a good place for us all to get together. He volunteered it. Keith's mom made a cake; Lewie volunteered his huge Lincoln and his services as a chauffeur. Mood made suggestions and I made the plan.
Lewie drove with me in the back seat and I picked up Linda. The two of us were driven back to Keith's place. We sang happy birthday, ate cake, and opened presents, and my heart ached. When the party was over, Lewie insisted, a little jealously, that he drive us home. Linda and I snuck out the back and drove off in my embarrassingly small 1974 dodge dart, which was a horrifying DOT orange. We parked in a cul-de-sac and I pulled her into my arms and we made-out like teenagers, because we were. I looked into those blue eyes and those words caught at the back of my throat. I hadn't learned yet that if you feel it, say it. Then I took her home.
Somewhere along the line, I got the idea in my head that I was dark and brooding, possibly because I was dark and brooding and it just wasn't popular yet. The second story is the night she came to my place. She and I sat on the floor of my guestroom with the door cracked open (because my father insisted) and whispered and talked and kissed. I wish to god I could remember the whole conversation. What I do remember is that she was tired of waiting. See, I learned on Valentine's Day that there was another man. I'd given her a rose and he'd given her a dozen. But, yet, she was still waiting on me. Somewhere in that conversation I said something dumb and logical about having to go to college and that I could not ask her to marry me.
And that was it.
With those words I somehow put in her head that I wasn't the one, that I didn't love her or want her, that I was never going to ask her to be my girl.
The night of her graduation I didn't see her. But Lewie told me that she had left with the other man and they were getting married. He was bumbling and stupid, but I think he was trying to be kind. Keith grew some balls and told Lewie to shut up. Mood just told me that I didn't need her.
There was an older woman in my life by then, an on again, off again love affair with a woman closer to my mom's age than mine. But every February 3rd, when Linda's birthday would roll around, I would remember. I ended up believing my own press and marrying a woman that "needed me," because I never thought I could do better.
Today, Linda lives in Douglasville again, by all reports she is a hobbiest in black-powder and muzzle-loading rifles and teaches Indian lore to kids.
I saw her one more time, driving down the road in Douglasville, she slowed and we looked at each other, I don't know if she recognized me. The moment is etched forever in my mind, just like that first kiss, and the night I stood on a golf course at night and Lewie told me she was leaving with the second choice.
She loved me, roses, and Billy Joel. It's 24 years later and I still turn the radio dial when "Uptown Girl" comes on. Everyone comes into your life for a reason. They teach you things and Linda taught me to say "I love you" when you feel it.
Everyone comes into your life for a reason, sometimes they stay.
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