Virginia Breeze

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Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school. ~Albert Einstein

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It’s Saturday morning again and it’s time to play the game of life. Remember that I told you on Wednesday that we were going to get here. And we did!

Well. Most of us did.

There are those who were here on Wednesday and have gone on into other realms unexpectedly. They were just like us and doing everyday things a few days ago.

And then something unexpected happened. Here in town we had a small airplane that took off this past week and then for some unexplained reason came back down on a nearby house. The house went up in flames and the person inside was severely burned. Hopefully she will survive. But the pilot and copilot did not.

Across the nation many things like this have happened since the last Saturday morning. And age was not a factor. I’m always assuming that you kick off because you are old and your organs have had enough. But it just is not so often enough to ask “Why?”

And here is the answer I have found.

This place is a school. Class is in session. And we don’t all graduate at the same time. Next month all the kids will feel the joy of being liberated for the moment. They will experience the precious gift of freedom.
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And that perhaps is one of the best lessons they will learn all year. Guard it well my children!

Don’t give it all away the first time you fall in love! Don’t forget to study and find yourself in a job that gives you very little in the way of opportunities to travel or do other things. First learn the game and play it well.

They sometimes suffer in their schools within a school. Because they just don’t get it! Surprise! Lots of adults don’t get it either. They are still in school and not learning very much out here in the big, wide wonderful world.

But there are opportunities to learn everywhere. I recently met a man who is around eighty years old and goes to the gym every morning very early. He still has a pretty nice job and makes a good living. And he is a kind and considerate person. His wife recently died and he misses her terribly.

And one other thing. When he was a child he was in a Nazi concentration camp.

We were having dinner in a restaurant one evening and he suddenly got one of those leg cramps that I complain about sometimes. I sometimes wake up with them at night and start yelling and waking up the neighbors.

I was watching his face when this happened and the pain didn’t register on it. His smooth and friendly expression continued on as he started rubbing his leg and said to us “Excuse me please. I have one of those leg cramps”.

So we are students of life here on earth for awhile. Hopefully we continue to learn as we get older or we are just taking up space somebody else could use.

And our teachers are here as well trying to help us understand and learn.

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Spring finally came to Boston as Cathy and I often went down to the Charles River to study. At least we tried to study. But there were sail boats fluttering by and flowers waving in the wind. She seemed fairly happy and I was enjoying the relative peace and calm our relationship had found after months of turmoil. At one point I suggested that we should live together. It was a foolish thought and she demonstrated this to me by showing up one evening with a small suitcase and her hair curlers. She sat on the bed and looked around at the shabbiness that surrounded her. I had moved out of the Babcock Street house and left Madam Blavatsky’s disciple to her secret thoughts.

The apartment was too small and the ridiculous nature of my thought was soon apparent even to me.

There were no more trips in her father’s small plane either. It was clear to me that she idolized this man who had built a successful business. I remember him showing me a warehouse out behind their house when we were in Williamsport. There was tons of frozen food out there and I imagine he was a local food distributor and a very busy guy.

So one evening we were watching television when there was a knock on the door and a close family friend stood in the doorway. I remember her answering the door and then a conversation about shoes. He had just bought some expensive shoes. Maybe they were made out of alligator skin. It’s funny the things we remember from decades earlier. It’s clear to me now that he must have been looking at the floor rather intensely and this drew her attention to his shoes.

And then he told her that her father had flown his small Cessna into the ground and was gone. As I jumped to my feet she fell to the ground and started to scream. And there was nothing any one of us could do at that moment except feel her anguish as she discovered the darkest depths of love lost.

I slept on the couch that night and she slept in her room with her family friend. The following day I went with them to the airport and said good-bye. Eventually she returned to school and I stopped by to see her. We had a short talk and she told me about a discussion she had with her mother while she was gone.

Her mother told her that she was playing a cruel game with me and should stop doing it. Apparently her mother had discovered a few things recently and wanted to help her daughter. I don’t know the details. I can only imagine.

Later that summer I fell in love with a beautiful girl and a few years later we were married. One day I was waiting for her on the front steps of my apartment when Cathy showed up in her convertible. We talked for awhile and then my future wife rolled in on her ten speed bicycle.

That was the last time I saw her. I hope she found some happiness somewhere along the line. We all do, hopefully, from time to time. It is so very important to find someone whom you can love and trust in this world.

When you find someone like this who loves you back remember to give them a hug every day of your life. And tell them how much they mean to you.

Always.

Part One

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Part Two

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Grab a feed and be here when it happens.

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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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I sit in a second floor room of a very large, old house on Babcock Street near Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts. Sounds drift through the open window as I attempt to memorize various parts of the human body. It would be much easier to do this if these parts were attached to the wonderful Cathy. My love of the moment is somewhere out there and probably close to the source of the sounds that penetrate my wandering mind.

The Who is playing over on Nickerson Field where Boston University’s football team attempts to win games on a man made surface. I attend those games because I play the saxophone in the band. But The Who is beyond my limited budget at the moment and I do need to study. Cathy has been a terrible distraction lately and now I must suffer the consequences of chasing after her beautiful mirage as it shimmers before me.

Because clearly she is not committed to this relationship. Right at this moment she is probably driving down Commonwealth Avenue in her 1968 Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible with the horn rimmed guy from the business school. I saw them the other day while walking in front of March Chapel. His head was barely sticking above the steering wheel but she didn’t seem to notice that he couldn’t see the road.

But I noticed the dwarfish fellow and it brought about a case of the dismal mood swings. Violent jealousy fought it out with depressed resignation over the whole affair. Neither seems to have the upper hand at the moment. I am stumbling forward as I attempt to make sense of this relationship.

So I sit here in this room while my crazy landlady with the ankles that are bigger than my thighs rummages around downstairs and talks to Madame Blavatsky while attempting to keep herself oriented to time and date. I must study.

I have no idea that I will regret my entire life not going to see The Who and letting myself rock off into a crowd induced euphoria. As it turns out everyone in this class will get a P for Pass because the professor talks about antiwar activities and encourages us all to demonstrate after class. He is undoubtedly a communist and so we must all pass and become successful graduates. For what purpose?

Who knows. There are so many things I do not know. My wonderful Cathy for example will have a most horrific moment and I will be a part of it. She will be sent to the floor as she screams in horror. She has the most wonderful laugh I have ever heard but she can also scream when she has been hurt most terribly.

But that event is down the road and for now she is most likely enjoying her business school bunny as he hops around doing her bidding. No doubt she is teaching him things I do not want to think about at this moment.

The breeze flutters the curtains and I turn back to the books. Downstairs my Theosophically inclined landlady is now playing the grand piano with great abandon. Thankfully she allows me to keep a few beers in her ancient refrigerator. It was part of a deal we made in the opening rounds. Beer is allowed but I can only have guys in my room.

No girls allowed. The gay guy who rents the next room and is a music school major thinks this is hilarious. But I am not so amused. Something must be done about my sad situation.

And hers too. She does not deserve to meet this monster who is tracking her to her door. We are on a tight schedule. Because now that I am old and looking down from above I can see the time coming when we will leave our youthful follies behind. We will proceed on our separate ways to adulthood because we feel we must.

Roger Daltrey starts screaming through my window. He disagrees with my assessment and pulls on my heart. I pull back and turn the page.

(to be continued)

More Writing

http://davidnotes.com/2008/02/12/vote-for-your-favorite-candidate-in-virginia/

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