At the bottom of much of both the despair and the joy that high school age kids experience is that terrible and wonderful boy-girl stuff. I think it colors the entire high school experience for some of us. For the rest it adds either a bit of brightness or darkness to those years, sometimes almost simultaneously.

I remember being fairly interested in girls at what would still be a shockingly young age, but my shy nature prevented any progress at all on this front until I was a Mounds View Junior in the late winter of 1960. Having no sisters, I was then (some would say still) totally clueless about the differences in outlook or expectations of members of the fairer sex. I do think that the lack of any early innocent formative experiences involving girls within the nuclear family might have produced some long-term deficits in instincts and general grasp of relevant issues of importance in male-female relationships. It certainly produced problems that year!

My big brother John was already a college sophomore by then and I think that he was worried that little brother Burt was never going to ask a girl out. He teased me from time to time, but that didn’t work, since our whole family is filled with stubborn mules. I’ve never quite verified this, but I’m suspicious that he’d shared his concerns with one of his best friends from Mounds View who happened to have a younger sister. Anyway, John and I were watching a Mounds View basketball game one winter night and we walked out to the dark (there’s much better lighting out there now) parking lot after the game. John made a point of connecting with his friend, who was also walking out there with his little sister in tow. They made a real point of introducing the two younger siblings, but between my shyness and the darkness, all I really knew was that she sounded nice.

A week or two later, John and the rest of our family were off at one of my mother’s sisters’ places celebrating some sort of family birthday. While there, John pretty much backed me into a corner and asked me if I’d gotten around to calling up the young lady and asking her out. Embarrassed, I said that I hadn’t, but that I might sometime. Not buying that, John continued to put pressure on me and pretty soon I found myself using my aunt’s phone to dial a number that he conveniently had with him. My heart was pounding and I stumbled through the most awkward request for a date imaginable, only to be amazed that the girl accepted in a very pleasant manner.

A few evenings later, I was knocking on her parents’ door and blushing my way through introductions while waiting for her to appear for what I think was a bowling date. When she walked into the room, I was stunned to find that she was absolutely beautiful. Although she was two years younger than I was, I quickly figured out that she understood the drill far better than I did. She was bright, sweet and had a very nice personality. We hit it off and had a great time and I knew that I wanted to see her again (and again and again). We did go out a few times, but it was sort of sporadic, since I was working evenings and weekends at a somewhat distant drugstore. Typically, evenings and weekends would be the times a couple might go out.

My work schedule, general inexperience and our family’s approach to the use of the telephone conspired against me. At our house, you only called someone on the phone when you really had to. The calls were all short and business-like. As a result, I only called this young lady when I had a specific opportunity to take her someplace. Each time I did so, she told me “yes” and then that was the end of the call. Our next contact would be when I picked her up at her house.

Well, my job kept getting in the way and I went several weeks without calling her. I finally figured out an occasion where I could arrange my schedule to go out and I called her. This time, she seemed genuinely distressed to inform me that she couldn’t go, since I’d not called her for such a long time that she’d started dating someone else. She said that even though she wasn’t planning to be busy the day I could have taken her wherever it was, she couldn’t date more than one guy at a time. That was the sad end of what might have been a wonderful love affair. Sigh.

I was crushed, of course, and it was many months before I went anyplace with another girl. It hadn’t even entered my mind that a guy could have called up a girl and just talked about whatever to keep things going. Duh. A few years later, I heard that she married this second fellow fairly soon after they got out of high school. I’ve no idea how that worked out, whether or not they had ten kids, whether she’s as maturely lovely now as she was youthfully so then or any of those things that would likely have been of importance to me if I’d not been a total dunce.

I’m a happily married guy at this point, but it might be slightly interesting to me (just intellectual curiosity, of course!) to learn a little bit about what happened to her when the wonderful Mound View 50^-Year Jubilee happens on July 31^st, 2004.

I’ll be the clumsy guy standing in the corner talking hoops and politics with everybody who passes my way.