When I was 12 years old my family took a vacation to a place called Pick Point Lodge in New Hampshire, this was probably around August of 1982 or 83. There were a hand full of cabins on a lake as well as one main house. This pace was about a 4 hour drive from our home in Massachusetts. My mother and step father drove my step brother and I there in a pick up truck. All our stuff, plus my brother and I rode in the open bed of the truck when it was perfectly acceptable to let let kids do that. I plugged in my Sony Walkman and listened to music the whole way up there having a great ride. My brother on the other hand hated every mile of it. He and I were very different then. One day while we were in New Hampshire, i met a girl out there named Emily Rolling. Emily was from Pennsylvania, though I cant remember what town. She was ther with a friend of hers, a red headed girl, and her family. I had liked girls in the past but Emily hit me like no one else. I wanted to spend every minute with her I could. I remember that one day my family was going on an outing and I played sick so I would not have to go; my mother saw right through that though. One night Emily and I sat on a pier at the boat house on the lake and just looked up at the stars all night. When the vacation was over, we exchanged addresses and told each other we would write. I wrote her and she wrote me, then I wrote her and never heard anything else from her again. At 12 years old, it felt like someone died to me when I did not hear from her again. The funny thing is I would go through that probably 10 more times in my life and it never got easier.
When I was 17 I worked at a store, a small general store in town. One of the other workers there was a girl named Laura Miranda. I was once again in love, but this time I had competition. There was another guy named Bill who lived right down the street from me who liked her as well. I was friends with Bill but as we competed for the affection of Laura, we grew more and more apart. One day Bill told me that the reason he liked Laura was because she had a big chest. I thought this was my chance to get ahead with her. I was talking to one of her girlfriends in the store and I told her that she should tell Laura to be careful because "some people" ( as I tried to hint toward Bill) like Laura simply because of the size of her chest. The plan was now in motion but it would soon become a train wreck that I was trapped under. When Laura got word of what was said she came up to me very angry. Instead of thanking me for warning her about Bill, she thought that I was the one interested in her because of her chest. She never talked to me after that again. In a minute my life was destroyed.
I look back on those, and many other events just like them, with both a sense of humor and a sense of pain. I learned alot about myself, about relationships, about people in general. I had the same thing happen to me later in life but it got a little easier to get over them and I always took something away from it. The best thing to take was some great memories of people that I truly cared about. I often wonder where they are, as well as some other people that I did not include here but may in the future. My hope is one day someone will read these posts, know someone that I have mentioned, and let them know I was thinking about them and would like to know how they are doing today.
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