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Part II/ Here is Part I
http://davidnotes.com/2008/02/11/1967-and-life-in-the-city-the-who-come-to-town/
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Grab a RSS feed and follow our path
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Cathy was full of surprises. She would be running around (or driving around in her Cutlass Convertible) with her business school friend one minute and then she would be at my door the next with much to say. Her major was sociology and she was always very curious about people. She liked to report on things she had discovered about them. As I look back it becomes clear that she was curious about me. I did not fit the BU mold. Perhaps I was a lab rat disguised as an unhappy boyfriend.
When she was happy we would often go off on long conversations about life as we explored the city. We would sit by the Charles River and study while the sail boats flew past. And then one day she surprised me with an invitation to come home with her for a weekend and meet her parents. I wondered how we would get there and she said her father would come get us in his private airplane. So we were off to Pennsylvania in a small airplane and since I had never flown before I was amazed by how peaceful everything looked far below. I glanced back at Cathy and discovered she was studying a small paper bag. We arrived and she did not seem to be her usual bouncy self for once.
Her parents seemed very nice although I did annoy her father a couple of times. I told him I was trying to convince Cathy to become an English major. It was a joking remark but I could tell he was not amused and I would not have been either under similar circumstances. We went out to dinner and he let the bartender give me a few drinks. This was before they dropped the drinking age to eighteen and then recognized their folly and pushed it back up again.
And then it began to snow. And it snowed and snowed. Soon we were buried beneath several feet of a cold blanket of the stuff and there was no way we would be able to fly back to Logan airport the next day. So we said good-bye and climbed aboard a Greyhound bus for the very long trip back to Boston. It was a day dedicated to long waits with an brief introduction to being together when you don’t necessarily want to be together. Because maybe you disagree about a few things and you are bored. In other words it was like being married for a few hours.
Spending sixteen hours side by side in this stressful environment following a weekend with the parents tested our relationship as it had not been tested before. We arrived home eventually and ran back to our apartments. I felt for the first time what it might be like to have a more permanent relationship with someone and was disturbed as if by a bad dream. Cathy was way ahead of me as most women are in similar circumstances. I went back to my books.
She no doubt called her business school buddy and went cruising in her car as soon as the roads became passable. But we were not done with each other. Our ride in the back of a bus through the snow fields of Pennsylvania was only a brief moment of inconvenience compared to what was to come. We could run but we could not escape the awful moment that would send her crashing to the floor and end our relationship as I looked on in horror.
I wanted to protect her but this was something I was utterly unprepared to do. I wanted to hold and comfort her but she was beyond caring on this terrible night.
We were still children. Sometimes young people marry and learn about adulthood as part of a package of both joyous and difficult times. Our education took little time and involved no ceremony at all.
And they forgot to include the joyous moments as well. I hope that somewhere down the road she did find them. I pray that she did. Because she certainly deserved to enjoy them all after her time dating me and the young Wall Street businessman.
I doubt he even remembers her today as he marches down Park Avenue in his platform shoes.
The last part:
http://davidnotes.com/2008/03/17/a-college-romance-reaches-its-limits-part-3/
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