The subject of “first crushes” came up in recently, which reminded me that I’ve been meaning to blog about this subject for a long time.
Oh… and as a forewarning — this is a really, really, really, ridiculously long blog.
Ah, the story of my first crush, way back in the days before electricity. *laughs* Just kidding — I’m not that old… but anyway, it’s a fairly cute story that has a strange twist at the end. After thinking about it for a while, I realized that it laid the groundwork of a path that most of my relationships took from that point forward, to a degree. Not sure what to make of that fact… but I also realized that, in retrospect, this little girl had been the basis for comparison in all my relationships thereafter, as far as looks are concerned.
Please feel free to share your insights into this matter, in the comments section… I’m curious if people generally base their life-long, superficial-level likes and dislikes on that first person who stole our hearts, or if I’m as strange as I think I am, alone in this perception.
I’ve changed all the names to protect people’s privacy… so we’ll call her Alice¹.
The year was 1977… we had all just spent the previous year celebrating the Bicentennial of our country, and President Jimmy Carter was ushering in a new era of peace and environmental awareness. Disco was starting to wane in popularity, Led Zeppelin and the Sex Pistols were on the radio, ABBA was appearing on every TV show you could imagine, and shows like M*A*S*H and Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show were required viewing on TV.
A young boy’s world was all about playing baseball, riding bikes outfitted with banana seats, “Chopper” handlebars and “Sissy” Bars, playing with Tonka trucks… it was about cutting grass and delivering newspapers for enough money to collect baseball cards… it was about watching “The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show” and “Speed Buggy” cartoons, followed by “American Bandstand” every Saturday morning. It was about playing in the creek at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, listening to rock and roll on a little black transistor radio (that was, of course, strapped to the handlebars of your bike), building clubhouses and playing Capture the Flag.
The rules of thumb were that you didn’t leave the neighborhood, and you were back in the yard before the street lights came on. (Many an evening was spent pedaling my bike as fast as my little legs would carry me… one eye on the road, the other on the street lights passing overhead, praying that they wouldn’t start flickering to life before I could make it to the driveway.)
It was so much simpler then… there was no such thing as a home computer, the Internet, or anything like that — I mean, PONG was just becoming available on exorbitantly priced home consoles. We wore Chuck Taylor’s and hand-me-downs until they were falling apart, played hard, dreamed of becoming an astronaut, and used our imaginations and cardboard boxes to make up better games than anything they have come up with on any computer.
In my recollection, boys at that time didn’t typically start noticing girls until they were around 6th or 7th grade… well, at least they didn’t admit to it, that I can remember. I was apparently the exception to that rule, because by the 4th grade, I had started noticing that girls were something more than a target to throw rocks at, ride my bike dangerously close to for the resulting scream, or to tease mercilessly on the playground. There was something different, dangerous and amazing about them… and when Alice moved to town, I was caught hook, line, and sinker for the first time in my life.
I attended a Catholic school as a child. We all went to church in the morning, and then attended classes for the remainder of the day, with two recesses interspersed. On one particular day, we had come back from church, filed into the classroom, and everyone was getting their textbooks and paper from inside the flip-top desks of that time. There was the usual commotion of the morning… kids asking one another if they had the answer to question 4 on the math homework, Sister Sara shushing the class, someone looking for a pen or where the scissors were… typical classroom banter. I was sitting in the second row in from the side blackboard, third seat from the back — and as I dug through my desk to find a single pencil that didn’t already have a broken lead tip, I remember hearing some commotion near the front of the class… I looked up over the lifted lid of my desk, and I saw someone in the front row that I had never seen before. The lid to my desk slowly lowered further and further… and although all I could see was the back of her head, I was entranced.
Sister Sara was finally able to quiet our boisterous group, and after standing up to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and a prayer or two, the class sat back down… but my eyes were transfixed on the front row the entire time. This new person had jet black hair, just like me… but it was a cascading river of riotous curls that hung down past her shoulders. I found myself absently tucking my shirt in a little better in the back, straightening my belt, and fidgeting slightly from one foot to the other, trying to see past her hair and shoulder. “Trevor, please sit down” I heard Sister Sara say, through a slight haze. I snapped to, and quickly slid into my seat, flustered that I had been called out.
Sister Sara started the day the same way she always did. “Good morning class.” she would cheerfully say… and in unified response, we would all give the sing-songy response of “Gooood moooorning Sissssster Sarrrraaa!”. “Thank you, class.” she would always say. “Before we start, I have an announcement to make. We have a new student joining us today. Alice, stand up and say hello to the class.” The object of my gaze timidly slid out from behind her desk and stood up, her eyes toward the floor… she adjusted her uniform nervously, turned toward the class, and raised her head.
The rest of the day was a blur to me, from that point forward… I remember her skin being a pure, porcelain white that I had never seen before, and her eyes were so bright and blue.. they were even more sparkly and blue than my Mom’s eyes. She had a slightly lopsided smile, and it appeared to be more of a well-intentioned smirk than anything else.
All I knew was that, for the first time in my very short life, I was smitten. Alice was beautiful in every possible essence of the word that I could comprehend. For a kid who had been watching way too much “Love Boat” recently, there were sparkly lights around her head, music was playing, and her voice sounded exactly like what I thought angels must sound like, at that age. She was nothing short of love and beauty, personified.
From that day forward, I made many, many feeble attempts to not be clumsy or awkward around her (which usually backfired in horrific displays of emasculation), to be nice to her, and to talk to her at any given opportunity, for any reason. I would intentionally break the lead on my pencil, just so I could walk up the aisle past her desk, and smile at her as I sharpened my pencil. She was a complete and total distraction to my young world, and I could think of nothing else but her. I couldn’t focus on homework at home, I wasn’t paying attention at school (which resulted in more than a few whacks with a ruler from Sister Sara). At that tender of an age, I had no idea what I wanted to do with her, or why I was so attracted to her… but I knew if I could just get her to feel the same way about me, it would surely involve a lot of holding hands, and telling people we were “going steady.”
On one particular weekend, I remember going to the gas station with my Dad. While we were waiting in line to pay for the gas, the man in front of us bought a Lottery ticket… but it wasn’t like anything I had seen people buy before. There was a new technology in Lottery games – the scratch card. Once you purchased one of these cards, you simply used the edge of a coin to scratch off this grey colored “gunk” to see what the prize was underneath. I watched the man intently, thinking it was one of the coolest thing I had ever seen… and suddenly, a light bulb popped on above my head. “That’s how I will get her attention!” I thought… and I couldn’t wait to get home.
Once back at the house, I ran to the closet and found a couple small pieces of paper, Crayons, and a magic marker. I grabbed a nickel off my Dad’s night-stand, then ran out to the porch for some privacy, dropped everything on the ground, and set to the task. I was in mad scientist mode, and nothing could stop me now.
I grabbed a black magic marker, and drew a stick figure on the paper. Then I pulled open my box of Crayons, and found the silver one. I knew that Crayon wax could be almost totally scratched off of paper, because I had tried it before, to remove errant coloring from outside the lines of a drawing once.
I started scribbling over the top of the drawing, until it was completely covered. Tipping the coin on it’s side, I gently started to scrape the Crayon off, like I had seen the man at the gas station do. It took a couple of tries with different weights of construction paper and using different ends of the crayon… but I finally figured out that with the right amount of pressure in using the crayon, it would come almost all the way off, to reveal the image underneath. I was ecstatic.
So I grabbed another piece of construction paper, and very carefully and gently, I drew:
I ♥
YOU!
I used the silver crayon to once again cover over the image, until nothing but a border edge of the construction paper was showing. And very carefully, along the edge, I wrote “Scratch this off to see a surprise.”
I couldn’t possibly have been more proud of myself for thinking this up – it was cool, it was fun, and she would surely know my feelings at that point. I carefully stuck the home-made scratch card in one of my schoolbooks, and waited anxiously for Monday to arrive.
Once at school on Monday, the day couldn’t pass by fast enough. I kept waiting and watching the clock, knowing that once we went to recess, I could slip back inside the school building, get the note out of my book, and put it in her desk.
Finally we went to the cafeteria for lunch, and I quickly wolfed down my food. I carried my tray back up to the counter, then nearly ran to get in line to go back outside for recess.
I was a kid on a mission.
We were finally told to go outside… and as everyone ran out onto the playground to get the best swings or teeter-totter seats, I casually walked over to the basement entrance to the school. I reached for the door handle, and I heard a voice behind me.
“Trevor, what are you doing?” Rats — the playground monitor. “Um… I need to use the bathroom. Bad. Really bad!” She gave me a sideways glance, then said “Well, hurry up. You should have gone when you were in the cafeteria.”
I nodded in agreement, then opened the door… once the door closed behind me, I ran up the stairs as fast as I could, rounded the corner, and ran down the empty hall to my classroom. I flung the door open, and half ran, half-slid to my desk. Carefully opening the cover of the book, I pulled the scratch card note out, then walked back up the aisle to her desk. I slid into her chair and lifted the lid… I immediately noticed how clean the inside of her desk was… her pens and pencils all nicely arranged, her books stacked neatly in two separate piles — this was a stark contrast to the shambles of crumpled papers and mountains of pencil shavings that were inside my desk – I was pretty sure there was a gremlin or two happily living in there somewhere.
And as I started to place the note on top of the stacks of those neatly arranged books, perfectly balanced in the middle so that it could not be missed, I imagined how she would react. Would she scratch off the Crayon in class, or wait until she got home? Would she know it was me? Of course she would… she couldn’t possibly have mistaken my feelings for her.
And as I thought this, the lid to the desk suddenly started to swing down on top of me.
I quickly pulled my hands up and backward, as the bang of wood slamming against metal reverberated in the room. I was momentarily sure that I had lost a hand in the makeshift guillotine. As my senses were trying to wrap around exactly what had just happened, and I was trying to stop blinking from the surprise… I saw the old, weathered hand of Sister Sara, planted firmly in the middle of the lid.
My eyes raised slowly to see her face, with an angry expression I had never seen before.
“Just what do you think you are doing, young man?” Sister Sara bellowed. She leaned over the desk, closer to my face, her hand still firmly holding down the middle of Alice’s desktop.
I stammered, trying to figure out how she had entered the room without me hearing her. My heart was racing, and my eyes shifted back and forth, trying to process what was happening. Her eyes raised slightly above my head… and it was then that I realized, in horror, that my hands were still up in the air like an arrested convict… and that I was still holding the note.
Sister Sara’s voice raised an octave. “What is that? What did you take out of her desk? You know that stealing is a sin!” I stammered “not mine…”, “giving her…”, and “not a sin…” were the only things that could come out. I was terrified.
She pulled the paper out of my trembling hand, and looked at it, front and back, as her brow furled. “What is this?” she demanded. I couldn’t make my mouth work… I just kept making monosyllabic sounds that were incomprehensible.
Her other hand lifted off the desk, and she leaned back. Her arm slowly raised, and she pointed to the door of the classroom. “Get outside, with the rest of your class. I will speak to your mother about this, when she comes to pick you up.”
I maintained my composure until I got out of the room. Tears ran down my face as I ran for the boy’s bathroom, trying to hide from anyone that might see me. My Mom would kill me. I was one dead kid. If Sister Sara figures out to scratch the Crayo… oh no… I put instructions on the card to scratch the crayon off!!
I went into 9-year-old hysterics.
I started to wonder if my brothers would keep my stuff, or sell it once I was dead. Well, sure, they would keep my bike, but they hated my new Pulsar action figure. They’d probably throw him away.
With the thought that my brothers would trash my favorite new toy, I knew I had to face the music. I wiped my face off and went back outside. I wandered around the playground aimlessly until the bell rang, and we lined up to go back in the building. As I walked into the classroom with everyone, I glanced at Sister Sara’s desk, and saw what appeared to be Crayon shavings.
She gave me a stern look, and my heart sank.
After school, Sister Sara told my Mom (in front of me, no less — because punishment wasn’t punishment in those days, without a serious dose of mortal embarrassment). I got a huge tag-team lecture from the two of them, about being too young to be in love, paying more attention to my schoolwork and less attention to girls, and so forth.
But that was the easy part.
The hard part was when word somehow filtered around the school, and people found out not only about what had happened, but also what the letter said, and who it was to.
Alice never really talked to me again after that day… I’m not sure if it was because she never had felt the same about me, or if it was from sheer embarrassment and being teased. I never really got the chance to find out, either. It wasn’t long before her Dad got transferred again, and she moved out of our small town. She went on with her life, and I went on with mine.
Many years later, when I was in High School, she came back to town to visit with some friends or family. I only saw her briefly… and of all places, it was in the parking lot of that same school and church. She looked exactly the same, and I had the same gut-butterfly reaction, even after all those years.
When she caught my eye across the swing-set area, she smiled softly, waved and mouthed “Hi” to me – I guess she had found it in her heart to forgive the transgressions of 9 year old puppy love.
Today, I have no idea what ever became of Alice. It’s been over 20 years since I last saw her, that day in the parking lot. I’m sure she went on to college, probably got married and has a family, and is probably successful doing something out there in the world.
But I can’t help to occasionally think about the amazing, beautiful black-haired girl that first caught my heart, all those years ago… and how there has been a surprising amount of repetitive correlations between that experience, and the many more that were to follow, as well as my preference in looks being directly attributed to her.
Turning the time machine of my life forward, to present day… coincidence seems to be playing out in a bizarre “more-strange-than-life-will-allow” twist to this story:
The Colorado Lottery has recently started running a series of television commercials, all of them featuring new scratch games that they have released. At the very end of the commercial, they show a beautiful woman facing the camera that has long black hair, and beautiful, crystal-blue eyes… she holds a scratch card up and blows the shavings off at the camera, and gives a coy, slightly lopsided little grin.
I kid you not, people — she is the spitting image of Alice… or at least what I imagine Alice would look like today.
Who knows… life really is funny sometimes.
Be well, and take care of one another.
Ciao,
Trev
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¹ Alice - Those of you that knew me way back when may realize/remember who “Alice” is… if you do, I would appreciate you respecting her anonymity, in regards to any comments or thoughts you may post.
