Remembrance of Things Past
...written on 06.18.02, @ 11:01 a.m.
Tue June 18, 2002
They say you always remember your "first". Every time when June 4th rolls around, I remember . . .
Plop, plop, plop, went the sound of my feet as I dropped from one step to another, down the staircase to the library of my junior high school. My chin was to my chest and my mood was about that high as well, when at the bottom of the stairs, I looked up to see a tall lanky boy with black hair in a robin's egg blue shirt.
"Hi Squirt!" said the unknown boy.
"Hi." I answered with a confused stutter.
With a shuffle of feet, the robin's egg blue shirt with the tall, dark haired lanky boy in it, disappeared around the corner.
"Who was THAT?!" I asked my friend Eugenia, who had been slurping water out of the drinking fountain. "Who, Roger R.?" she answered.
Thus began the infatuation/love story that with innumerable twists and turns, on agains and off agains, would last eleven years.
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I admit it, I chased him. I didn't know what else to do. He wasn't in any of my classes, so our communication was via friends. Finally, I found out where he lived and every Sunday when our family went out for a pancake breakfast, I would implore my dad to drive by his house.
One Sunday, after some vigorous beseeching on my part, my dad turned down Roger's street. On previous excursions we just drove by the shuttered house, but on this occasion, the windows and doors were open and Roger was on the porch.
"Oh my GOD! There he is! There he is!" I screamed excitedly as our car slowed. Then to my utter horror, my dad pulled into Roger's driveway.
"What are you doing?!" I screamed as I dove to the backseat floorboard trying to hide.
Roger would tell me about this later. How one Sunday he was on his porch minding his own business, when a car with three people in it, a man driving, a woman in the passenger side and a little 7 year old boy in the backseat, pulled into his driveway to turn around. That wasn't so peculiar he said, but the fact that they were all laughing so hard with tears coming down their faces was.
I was so mortified after that little stunt that I never asked dad to drive by there again, which may have been his intention now that I think about it.
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"Wow, 30 cents profit! I've made 30 cents." said Roger, his arms bulging with the packs of bubble gum rope I had given him for his birthday on June 4th, the last day of school in the 7th grade. He was selling the birthday present I had gotten him! That confession didn't make me feel very good, so I just "humfphed" at him as I got on my bus.
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I soon recovered from that episode enough to send him a Snoopy card over the summer. I had second thoughts about it though, and enlisted my friend Becky to go to Roger's house with me to waylay the mailman so I could get the card back.
We were casually sitting on the lawn of Roger's house talking, when I looked up the street to see Roger and his friend pointing at us. I urged Becky to get up and we ran as fast as we could to the corner, rounded it and threw ourselves out of sight on the grass laughing so hard I thought our sides would split.
Soon however, two huffing and puffing shadows fell upon us, letting us know that Roger and his friend had found our hiding place. It turned out that Roger had already gotten the greeting card the day before.
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"Kim! Roger's at the house! Roger's at the house!" said my little brother Mike when he found me at the bakery a few blocks from home.
"You LIE!" I said vehemently and with a flip of my long hair turned to Becky to ignore him. It was impossible. You see, I had, throughout the year, pestered the poor boy to death, so there really was no way that he could be at my house. He didn't even know where I lived. Did he?
Mike was extremely insistent however, so with bulging bakery bags, my heart in my throat, Becky and my brother trailing me, I made a mad dash for my house.
It was true! Sitting as cool as a cucumber on my living room couch was the object of my many affections and incantations (yes, two weeks earlier I had tried a magic spell). Becky was too enthralled by it all to excuse herself and sat down with us in the living room. I managed to get out a few niceties, when a resounding boom heard on the stairs signaled the approach of my father. He trumpeted his appearance with a "So, are you here to marry my daughter?", upon which I just willed the bean bag chair to swallow me up right then and there.
I guess we had a fun summer, while it lasted. I snuck out a couple of times and helped Roger with his paper route, and he came over to my place. No kissing, no hand holding, just being together.
Then came the announcement that our family was being transferred to Atlanta. I was crushed and swore to Roger that I would write to him, which I did, many times in fact, but no response came for a long time.
Maybe it was my persistance, but one day there was a letter from him in my mailbox proclaiming his own interest in our relationship, and oh happy days of days when two years later my family was transferred back to Dayton and our relationship resumed.
This is the on again-off again part. Tenth grade, eleventh grade, the first year of college. Then the final trip to his house on that by now famous street, only to be greeted by a beautiful young woman with long red hair who claimed to be his wife and who proudly showed me their little girl and I smiled and cooed at her while inside my heart was breaking knowing that I had waited too long.
I pretty much lost touch with Roger, but our mutual friend, Gregg, told me that he was working at the post office and had started his own business. I went off on my own life to Arizona and then on to the Dominican Republic (D.R.) for Peace Corps.
After two years in the Peace Corps, I returned to Dayton and started a masters in counseling. One day the shipment of stuff I sent from the D.R., one big brown box and a large red plastic trash can I had filled with books and papers, arrived. I looked at the brown box and noticed that someone had written something on it with a black magic marker:
"Do you still lick your upper lip?"
It was a message from Roger who had obviously come across the box in the post office where he was working. It was our secret code gesture for when we wanted a kiss.
I always remember June 4th with a smile.