When I was a boy I was shy, aloof, fat, anxious, and impatient with my peer group…not the best combination for social success in the emotional cesspool that high school could be. I was also cursed and blessed with a vivid imagination, a facility for written expression, and a yearning poet’s heart that, in ways both naively expansive and painfully insular, wanted to love and be loved.
Not surprisingly I had crushes that both elevated and devastated my foolish romantic’s heart and soul. Each one had its own soundtrack...songs forever identified with specific people.
Back in those days…the halcyon days padding the halls of Louis Pasteur Junior High and Alexander Hamilton High School (Los Angeles liked to dedicate their schools to dead white men…a function of the times they were built rather than any overt racism…to the point where a tongue-in-cheek suggestion to change the name of another school to honor Marilyn Monroe rather than James Monroe, a seemingly reasonable notion to me given where we lived, was shot down with vehement disdain by the powers that be)…back in those childhood days I carried torches that warmed and seared me to the core.
From the perspective of age I look back and see that some of my crushes from that time…four of them in particular…added more color to the tapestry of my life than I had previously consciously acknowledged.
Those four…two older, two among my peers…linger with me in ways I would never be arrogant enough as to believe that I linger with them.
They all seemed to like me. They all saw me as harmless. They all loomed in my head with more vividness than the reality of our acquaintance should have allowed for. They still do.
One died suddenly while I was still in the process of becoming a man.
One I willingly surrendered my virginity to in an act that meant much more to me than it did to them.
One shared what turned out to be final goodbyes with me on the last day of our High School life in the parking lot of Hamilton early one morning after having spent the previous hours indulging a last gasp of childhood at Disneyland, the place where childhood never ends.
One never saw my crush because I was too scared to really let it show…it was, of course, a time when I imagined that rejection would literally kill me… and because they had a crush of their own that was not me.
Those four…one gone, two hopefully living well out in our sweet old world somewhere, one in the circle of my acquaintance once and again…none of them knowing what an indelible impact they made on my journey from then to now…linger in my soul, memory making the music of their souls ever sweeter in the golden realm of affectionate nostalgia.
It was and is a gentler, sweeter madness...the songs, like my heart, remember when...and I thank them all for that.
