There are a handful of moments that define your life. It’s amazing when you think about it. I am fairly certain that ninety percent of who I am and what has happened in my life can be traced back to a few chance encounters and rash decisions. It wouldn’t even make a top ten list, there are so few transcendent moments in your life. While those moments are few they stay with you for the rest of your life. And one of those happened to me seventeen years ago tonight, half a lifetime ago, and I still think about it to this day.
I’ve written about being in high school before but I still don’t know if I’ve ever been able to describe what my life was like growing up. It is easy to just use the shorthand phrases of being a nerd and a geek but that really isn’t accurate. Yes, I was a top student and too smart for my own good but it wasn’t like I was being picked on. Never got into a fight and while people made fun of me I did so myself. Heck, I was officially a two sport letterman (though that was for being a football trainer and a baseball manager). In the end I think it could be summed up like this, at school everyone knew me and liked me. The second I left school property everyone forgot that I existed. As I’ve often said, the only time anyone ever called me was when they needed the answer to problem number seven.
But like I said, it wasn’t a bad life. Not a great one, but it became an acceptable level of solitude. I could always fall back into books and music and movies and use that to fill up the hours when everyone else was hanging out. That might explain why I was looking to do something prior to my senior year of high school. As all of these colleges were sending me brochures trying to recruit me I would occasionally get one from a school offering a summer program. Usually a few weeks of sample classes and I thought it would be good to go to one. Plus, it would be great on the college applications and just might be what I needed to get into Duke. (That debacle is a story for another day.)
The one I ended up choosing was at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. Not exactly one of the top schools in the country but it was close by and I was thrilled by the courses that I was going to take. One was on planned communities and what happens when you try to structure a society. The other was on poverty in a world of plenty and how do you define and address a problem that large. I’d still like to take classes on those subjects today but that isn’t what changed my life.
No, what changed my life was walking down to the game room in the dorm we were staying in for the first time and joking around with some of the other people in the program. Playing ping pong and laughing was this girl with short blonde hair and a cute smile. I noticed her, not sure why but I did. And I was thrilled when I found out later that night that we were in the same classes. I remember sitting on the grass next to her, just talking and cracking jokes (she told one about a dyslexic atheist who didn’t believe in dog). The thing I remembered most about her was that she was wearing orange shoes. That struck me for some reason. Maybe it was because that made her unique or original or maybe it was because I was too shy to look her in the eye so I focused on her feet. Either way, I had a voice in the back of my head telling me that I needed to get to know this girl better.
And over the course of the two weeks we certainly did. We were pretty inseparable at times, me the smart, quiet kid from Chicago and her the funny artistic girl from a small town in Minnesota. I could spend pages telling some of the stories, including one that involved someone mistaking us for a couple and a client when we were helping out at a health clinic. It was tough to say goodbye and we promised to write, which for you young kids out there is what you had to do before they invented e-mail. I wrote her the day I got back home. Four nights later I was sitting in my bedroom watching MASH when my brother told me that I had a phone call from some girl. And I was just floored by the fact that someone could tell me that they missed me.
Most of my memories of my senior year of high school are of sitting in the basement on Sunday nights and talking to Meg. Sitting on the floor of my bedroom and writing letters while listening to a tape of U2’s “The Unforgettable Fire”. It was a long distance relationship but it was a real one. We truly cared about each other and I’ll always say that she was the first person who liked me for the fact that I was me and she always encouraged me to see in myself what she saw. She was, without a doubt, the first love of my life.
But it was long distance and we went our separate ways. Occasionally we’d get back in touch with each other and we’d fall right back into our old routine. I lost track of her a few years ago and now it seems silly that I’m writing about a girl I haven’t talked to for a decade. But honestly, last Thursday night I had a dream about a girl with short blonde hair and a cute smile. And I knew who it was and for a moment I wished that my dreams could come true. I don’t know where you are in the world Meg but thanks for coming into my life. It was one of the best moments of my life.
The five random CDs for the week:
1) The Elders “Pass It On Down”
2) R.E.M. “Live Collection”
3) The Young and the Sexy “Stand Up For Your Mother”
4) U2 “October”
5) Sting “The Soul Cages” (My very first CD! Bought over 16 years ago.)
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