Imagine Your Future Determined at Age 13

I just dropped Jack off at band camp.  As he got out of the van, a group of girls walking by saw him and froze in their tracks, gleaming towards him with the biggest, bracesiest smiles I’ve seen in a long while.  Another girl then turned around and I could read her lips as she asked her frozen grinning friends, “That’s him?!”  Giggle, giggle.

I had fun watching the whole thing play out from the invisible driver’s seat of my mom van.  It made me smile, those goofy kids, and then as I drove away it hit me like a Mack truck.  Jack is the same age as I was when I was grinning and giggling at who was to become my husband for life. 

Lord, we were both Jack’s age.

Jack noticed the girls, ducked his head a little, wearing his own smirky grin, and carried on walking right past the girls with his trumpet case, on into the school building. 

I can’t say he inherited that smooth gene from his father.

Flashback, FHS 1981.  Gary, who I knew had been a  stinkin’ Lincoln kid, came up to talk to me, to meet me, in the Biology class we shared our Freshman year.  He was facing me, locking eager eyes with mine as I imagine he was formulating just what he was going to say and my heart was beating fast as I realized he was going to say something.  He, so suavely, backed up to sit up on the writing part of the desk in front of me, trying to make a good first impression I’m sure as we spoke for the first time. 

He definitely captured my full attention…..as he flipped the whole dang desk.  He and it both landed on the floor.  

That was thirty years ago.  1981.  Wow.  We were just kids.  Kids that had no idea at that time they would be together for forever but were kinda wishing they would or could.  Maybe?  I can’t really remember exactly what was in my mind, and honestly it was probably nothing past getting to the Dairy Queen at lunchtime, but I did know I liked a boy that could make me smile and laugh and I seemed to have found him right there at my feet.  I knew we must be friends from that day on. 

So we continued on as friends through high school (meaning getting teased and tricked with gags pulled on me on a daily basis and me acting fake-mad until I busted out laughing at his latest stunt), with an actual date our junior year.  We went to a movie.  We sat in the car in the driveway talking afterward.  I can’t remember which movie, but I do clearly remember I wrote with an ink pen on his feet.  Weird I know, but we’ve already established, kids are goofy, especially around someone they like. 

The next school year, our senior year, the attraction to be together as more than friends only grew.  Trouble was, I already had a boyfriend.  So Gary and I passed fun notes to each other in Comp. class and found whatever excuse we could to do more research so we could spend time together in the library.  By the last month of school, May, the attraction spiked supreme and I broke up with the other guy right before graduation. 

Gary and I finally had our long-awaited second date.  And that would be the night my grandma came out looking for me, worried to death since I hadn’t come back to her house by midnight as I was supposed to.  But that was the night, a really special night for us, Gary and me.  We were finally together and I had to tell the boy that I just got, that I was in love with, goodbye.  And I just couldn’t do it.  We finally said it at about three o’clock in the morning when we knew we just had to part; we had no choice.  He was leaving in a few hours for Florida were he was moving with his parents until he started the Naval Academy a few weeks later.  It felt like we would never see each other again.  

This was our song.  It was heartbreaking that whole summer every single time I heard it on the radio.  But I never did forget him.  Truthfully, I never really got over him.

And we did see each other again.  As winding and complicated as it was over the next ten years with moves and military and losing touch and college and other marriage proposals and engagements (gasp),  we were at last reunited for good, thank you baby Internet, and it worked out beautifully in the end. 

July 13, 1996

Today marks the anniversary of the date we were married.  From a flipped desk at age thirteen to a family of four kids on a farm and fifteen years of marriage, I can’t help but think it all was meant to be.