Marking time
Randy is in the top right corner, I’m in the right. Pretty much in the same position, like bookends.
November marked 30 years since we (re)met at our 20th high school reunion. We were together 28 years before he died, but the 30 year mark struck me.
Prior to the reunion, through some tenuous connections to acquaintances with people I had gone to school with, I learned the sweet story I had never known at the time.
Randy had fallen in love with me when I was the new kid in class in the 4th grade. He gave me an anonymous valentine, bought me a ring he never gave me, believed he loved me more than his ugly dog Mimi, and frequently lay under the willow tree in the park while he imagined kissing me.
So at the reunion I went right up to him and said, “I hear you had a crush on me.” And he replied, “Who are you?” And then we talked for 2 hours.
And I was surprisingly uninterested in talking to anyone else. Here was a guy I had never talked to before, yet I found talking to him to be so comfortable that I lost track of everything around me. There was one former classmate, Marcie—someone we had known since grade school—who kept filtering around Randy, asking him to dance, trying to get his attention. We paid no attention to her, just kept talking.
And then cake was served and we sat down to eat cake. He had frosting on his lip and I leaned in to wipe it off. So there, Marcie. It was the kind of flirtatious behavior I would never had expected of myself. It sounds like a silly rom-com.
And then it got late and we went outside and he hugged me and I felt a jolt—again like a rom-com. And after I went back to my room, after I went beck home, I kept thinking about it. And I’ve never stopped thinking about it.