Coming up on three years ago. Lilly.
It was just a few months after I moved to Boston. I was still doing everything on my own, finding my way around town. Somewhere I stumbled across a listing for a concert by a band I’d been wanting to see for a couple years. It was at a little club called the Paradise, near BU. I got there pretty early, staked out a good spot on the balcony. The concert was great, especially since I didn’t know quite what to expect. And after the first few songs I noticed a woman standing down on the main floor, stage right. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. My tastes have always been uniquely my own, I’m not sure any other guy there would have seen her the way I did. She had glasses and red hair down past her shoulders, although it was kinda hard to pick out the color for sure in the club lighting. So the show kept going, and I was dividing my time between watching the band and watching her, and spending all my time trying to think of something to say to her. I’m terrible at introducing myself, flirting, drawing attention. I don’t know if it’s shyness, exactly, I’m fine once I get an actual conversation started. But I can’t talk just for effect, I need something to say. So I knew I had to say anything to her, but anything is too broad and I had to find something. It turned out I never did. The concert ended and I left, mentally kicking myself all the way home on the trolley.
I called one of my friends back in Seattle and told her about it. I don’t know if I’d ever been quite so frustrated with myself. My friend told me what you’re probably all thinking now, don’t let it happen again. (Actually, I think she may have told me two things, the other was that I was an idiot. I was in no position to disagree.) It was too late this time, but if anything even remotely like that happened again I had to do something. So I had plenty of resolve but no underlying facts, and in the back of my head I knew that you never see things like this coming and I should have had more than enough resolve last time.
One month later. Another concert. This was a folk singer I’d followed off-and-on for a few years. I found a web page with his tour schedule and I saw he was doing a concert in Wellesley, which is in the Boston suburbs. When I tracked down the details it turned out the show was going to be at one of the sororities at Wellesley College. I didn’t know quite what that would be like, but I went anyway. The first time I saw this guy was on the Tonight Show. I was hoping he wasn’t too frustrated with his career if he’d gone from Johnny Carson to a sorority at a women’s college. Of course that might have been his fondest ambition as well. I got to this concert early, too. It turned out they’d just moved all the furniture out of the front room and put a microphone stand and amp at one end. There weren’t even chairs for the audience, people were just sitting on the floor so I picked a spot up front and sat down. Eventually the place filled up, and of about seventy people in the room there were maybe five guys. There was an opening act, a guy who’s actually made it pretty big in folk circles since then. He didn’t even use the microphone, just stood in the center, played guitar and sang. It was all just a brilliant throwback. There was this perfect communal, college feeling, more than I ever had at my college, even. After the first guy finished there was a little intermission and I started talking with the woman on my right. We were talking about music and other shows we’d been to and I mentioned the one from about a month before. I heard someone from tbe group on my right say she’d been at that show. I looked over, and it was the same woman.
(I know I need to jump in here and explain the other thing you’re thinking right now, how could I be so thunderstruck and then not recognize her? Well, she’d had her hair cut shorter, and the lighting was better, and it was a different place, and just what were the odds?)
So now the guy I was there to see came out, and it was another great concert and I had all the same thoughts going through my head. I still had the resolve from talking to my friend but I still didn’t have anything to say, either. The show ended, everybody got up to stretch their legs. She drifted just far enough away from the group she was with for me to talk to her alone. I don’t even remember what I said, but it worked. I got her phone number and her name, ecstasy!
And it only got better from there. We went to a movie that first weekend and had a great time. Dinner the next weekend and another great time. Every time I was getting ready to call her or see her, I’d get a little bit nervous, but that just disappeared as soon as we started talking. She said things I wish I’d thought of. I found out she was actually a student at the college. I wasn’t sure exactly how old she thought I was and I was trying to figure out exactly the right time to bring that up, but otherwise I was head over heels. She left for a few weeks over winter break. When she came back we did another dinner and a movie with a couple of friends of hers from Harvard. Then I called her a few days later to ask her out again and she said she didn’t want to see me anymore. Wouldn’t even give me a reason.
I’m not sure if I took it well. I said maybe five words to the people I work with over the next month. And some things still remind me of her, like this thread, for instance.