Old Flames
I got an e-mail awhile back from an old girlfriend from my high school daze. How she got hold of me is no mystery since it’s how a lot of folks get in touch these days now that we’re all on the great data bank of the internet. She probably could’ve gotten my driving history, my credit rankings, my employment information, my political affiliations and hopefully my marital status with a few clicks of a keyboard. No accidents, no tickets, no job, no credit rating, no kids, no tea party memberships. One wife. Happily married. Very happily.
We had a nice and cordial correspondence in which, in a few paragraphs, we filled in the years since we held hands in my folks’ Buick and smooched in the woods near our place before I had to trundle off to my job on the second shift at the Coca-Cola Bottling plant in Northern Wisconsin. She would soon be off to college while I would be two more years getting out of my hellhole high school. She was really my first love, a platonic affair that was something we both could look back on and smile at, if not laugh out loud for how sappily sweet and innocent we were. Outside the Amish community, those relationships are as unlikely now as a horse drawn carriage.
I don’t think she had any interest in one of those Facebook affairs or anything like that. You know: look up an old flame and see what they’re doing now that maybe we’re lonesome or divorced and the kids have moved on and our parents have died. Send a few photos to see if we’ve grown a bad paunch or lost our teeth or maybe our smiles or gone to seed and old age. If not, maybe make a date for dinner or drinks, fall in the sack, fall in love, give that 45 year hiatus a kickstart and see if our adolescent judgement was still okay.
Happens everyday on the internet. Nothing to smirk about either, you ask me. Love is a commodity in short supply these days and I wish folks the best at finding it, whether it’s a seedy bar or an e-mail to that kid they dated back in the good old days who went off with old so-and-so and found out 20 years later it was a bad marriage.
But it is odd to have the distant past come around the corner at you. A sort of ‘what if?’ moment. Not just what if for some imagined life with someone you knew when you were sweet 16 and never been kissed, but all the forks in the road, all the imagined possibilities one choice made unfeasible for all the others. I am not immune to such flights of fantasy, having gone back to find a love thought lost, hoping beyond reason she would not be married, would not have kids, would not have a life real enough to make any fantasies of mine dissolve like a cold fog in a summer sun. No, if anyone understands the impulse to go back, to take the fork not taken, you bet it’s me. It is a rare thing to backtrack, to see the mistake and go back for a possibly well-deserved rejection, then to have it fall the way your mind’s eye imagined it, corny and uncynical, an old Hollywood love story nobody could sell today.
I’m fairly certain my childhood squeeze isn’t looking for anything more than some spark of nostalgia, a small suspended friendship from across the gulf of years, a gentle reminder that we parted friends, no hard feelings either, and went off to live lives totally apart and different from the other’s. She does, after all, have a husband, kids, grandkids, a complete life in a small town near where she was born. Teaches Sunday School at her church, goes to her kids’ weddings, just retired from her job even though her husband still has a year or two. She’s not looking for a romance novel here. Although the missuz may not be as certain. And I’m not looking for a bodice to rip. Unless it’s the missuz’s….
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Tags: Facebook romance, Facebook Search for lost loves, Facebook Tracking