WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN...?

This photo was taken at Kensico Dam, upstate NY in 1965 by my very first "serious" boyfriend, initials R.A. I was 17 years old when we first met, and he was 22...impossible to imagine, even more impossible to forget.

At that time, we were crazy in love, but how can anyone that young even begin to know what "love" really is?

We only dated approximately 1-1/2 to 2 years; it was a troubled relationship, filled with arguments, mutual antagonism and unnecessary provocation, even a touch of violence...something, given my background, I could not, would not tolerate. And so, sadly, we broke up.

But now, almost 50 years later, bittersweet memories of those sunlit, happy days come flooding back into my mind, along with the question, what might have been?

We stayed in touch even after breaking up, until one day he told me he wanted to "settle down and have children" and did not want me to interfere with the new relationship he was cultivating at the time. Still, when I heard the news that he had gotten married around 1971-2, it hit me hard, like a punch to the heart. We had once loved each other, how could he just plan to marry someone for the sake of "settling down"? I refused to marry anyone until I was 48 years old, smack dab in the middle of an emotional breakdown. Needless to say, that didn't last long...all of 7 weeks.

But one night around 1975-6, I was living alone in a sweet little Riverdale apartment when the intercom alerted me to a visitor downstairs. To my enormous surprise, it was R.A. and his best friend, Bobby. They were looking for someone else and noticed my name listed among the building's residents. As they explained, they looked at each other and said "could it be??" And so it was. It was a happy visit, and I was sincerely glad to see them both again.

After that, R.A. continued to stay in touch, if sporadically. He had moved upstate with his family, but always called when he traveled to NYC, and sometimes we'd get together for lunch or a walk along the boardwalk of a local beach, or just visit at my home. Nothing romantic, just old friends getting together to share memories, talk and laugh.

Then, one day in 1992, he called and there was an urgency in his voice that I could not ignore. We made a date for him to come visit, and he brought along a still-unreleased recording by Amy Grant (for whom he was working at the time) titled "I Will Remember You." At his request, I listened, not really hearing the words until he was gone. That night, I played the tape again and my heart broke into a million pieces...

I will be walking one day down a street far away, and see a face in the crowd and smile,

Knowing how you made me laugh, hearing sweet echoes of you from the past,

I will remember you...

Look in my eyes while you're near, tell me what's happening here, see that I don't want to say goodbye

Our love is frozen in time, I'll be your champion and you will be mine,

I will remember, I will remember you

Later on when this fire is an ember, later on when the night's not so tender, given time though it's hard to remember, darling, I will be holding, I'll still be holding you,

I will remember you

So many years come and gone, and yet the memory is strong, one word we never could learn...goodbye.

True love is frozen in time, I'll be your champion and you will be mine

I will remember you

So please remember

I will remember you
I will remember you...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAolVR5qHRw

If my heart "broke into a million pieces," how must he have felt when I "listened" but just did not hear what he was trying to tell me until he was gone, this time forever?

It is said that first loves are never forgotten. They're tucked away into a corner of one's heart, like a scrapbook, and taken out every so often to 'remember.' 

So, my dear R.A., my very first serious boyfriend, if by chance you are reading this some day, please know that I do still love you and always will. And I am so very, very sorry for not being old enough, wise enough, and sensitive enough to hear the poignant words you wanted so much for me to understand.

You told me that, when you first heard this song, you told Ms. Grant "Amy, you just wrote the story of my life."

It is now also the story of my own...

THE UNCOMMON COLD

Okay, before you start looking like freaking Rudolph, you awake one night to the feeling that someone has struck a match at the back of your throat.

AAAGGGHHH, is this a cold coming on??

If you're able to fall back to sleep with your throat on fire, you'll wake up the next morning semi-deaf, and sneezing your brains out. Oh, it is, indeed, a cold. Lucky me!

"Common" or not, it's a bitch to contend with because after the deafness comes a complete shutdown of your taste buds. "Oh, was that red-hot tabasco sauce on my scrambled eggs? Why, I didn't taste a thing!"

Then comes the helium balloon-head, attached to your neck by the thinnest of strings. After buying $1,000 worth of cold supplies ~ from nose drops to 'Breathe-Right Strips' (that cause your nostrils to look like red caves...) to 40 boxes of tissues to cough medicine, ad infinitum, your voice becomes either becomes thick and raspy or disappears altogether.

But people say "You sound sexy!" Really? Well, I feel like crap on a cracker, but thanks anyway...

And when the cold seems to be on its nasty way out, you develop a hacking cough that could wake up the dead 50 miles away. Charming...

Forget about putting a man on the moon. How is it even possible that we're now able to SKYPE with people around the world, but continue to suffer the common (and uncommon) cold?

There's an old saying about colds..."One week coming, one week with you, and one week leaving."

So far, I'm only into my second day of "with you" and I am not looking forward to what's up next.

If you have a cold, God bless you!  

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I've always felt an enormous affinity for F. Scott Fitzgerald. Some may say "you may have known him in a former life" and if that were true, I'd be thrilled but humbled. Others, simply that I can identify with his prolific writings.

He not only gave the "Jazz Age" its name, he and wife Zelda Sayre symbolized it. It was a heady time to be young, talented, and in love. It was also a time of tragic artistic dissipation.

I recently came upon a quote from "Babylon Revisited" ~ "Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material..." (And if you've ever had a skin split on one of your fingertips, you know how unbearably painful it can be.)

Yet another arrow through my heart. It's been a very long time since I broke away from my natural family, for one reason or another. But time does not do a thing to heal the gaping wound of being a 'man without a country' or, in this case, a woman without a family.

The barbed arrows received from my family are still entombed in my heart. But so is the love I felt for them so very long ago. So the above quote from Mr. Fitzgerald holds true:

All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase--"I love you."

But how do you stop loving people you once adored? And how do you accept the fact that, regardless of how much you loved them, that same love was never returned in its (your own) peculiar intensity?

F. Scott Fitzgerald died at a young age...he was only 44 years old, but drinking (probably to literally drown the inner pain he must have felt) brought him an early death and, I sincerely hope, peace. I envy him that...

As for family, I will end this with another quote from the great Mr. Fitzgerald:

"It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory."

With love, in all its inequality,

Paula