After twenty-five years her eyes still sparkled as they fixed on mine from across the table. She asked, “Why did none of us date?”
The people from the after-reunion, and her new husband, vanished for a moment and I met her look with confidence I did not have when we were in high school. I said, with a note of regret, “It was hard to cut one of you out of the herd.”*
“Yes, we stuck together pretty tight,” she said wistfully, and the moment ended.
The previous moment, a quarter century before, did not last much longer. We had both visited a mutual friend, quite coincidentally, and she gave me a ride home. She was not one of the popular girls, nor was she considered a class beauty. At a time when long, straight hair was the thing she wore hers in close, blonde curls, like a flapper. Her clothing was not stylish and it disguised her figure, which had become, frankly, stupifying. She had a bubbly, flighty personality that made it easy to dismiss her, so her seconds of biting snark were surprising and effective and it took me years to figure out how smart she really was. During high school she had grown from a geeky girl into an unexpectedly beautiful woman. She was not flashy, so it took a while to notice her, and longer still to realize how stunning she was. I was smitten, but lacked the confidence to do anything about it and afraid she would laugh at me for my presumption.
She and her friends were part of my Teen-Aged Republican crowd** and because they were always together it was hard to get to know any one of them, and harder still to know her, but now I wanted to know her. Everything about her. I realized she might be The One, so when we stopped I turned to her and asked to kiss her. The kiss was long and deep and seemed mutually desired, and I left her car in a daze.
A few minutes after I went inside the phone rang. It was our mutual friend and she was giggling as she slyly said, “I know what you did!”
I was mortified. As soon as she got home she had called her friend and told her all about it, and now the friend seemed to be mocking me, just as I was afraid would happen. I did not—could not—pursue that relationship, and we didn’t speak again until the reunion.
Did I overreact? Yeah, obviously. Was I an idiot? I have always been an idiot; why would I stop then? Was that intended as a congratulatory call, that the two of us had finally gotten together? It is a very real possibility. Did she put off marrying until she was in her forties because she could not find a man who could compare with me, and settled for a guy who was merely rich, handsome, and ten years younger than her? I like to think so. Would my life be very different if I had followed that fork in the road? Undoubtedly. That’s what forks do, and the woman I married a few years later helped set my life on a path very different from what I expected in 1974.
Your turn. Where did you not follow a fork in the road, and what do you think the consequences were? Please contribute because, if you don’t, remember that I’m the Grandpa Simpson of the SDMB. I have more of these endless, pointless stories and I’m not afraid to tell them.
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- The cowboy metaphor I really used. Ain’t I romantic?
** - Shut up. The story of every man’s odd decisions always begins with, “Well, there was this girl…” Or boy, as the case may be. She wasn’t that girl, but I was a boy of easy infatuation.
- The cowboy metaphor I really used. Ain’t I romantic?