Sure and it’s setting up to be a grand morning! I read the Obituaries today [I was not among the featured] and my pregnancy test came back negative. Small wonder then I’m in such a good mood. Also, it seems to me that when I am tranquil, my mind wanders off, often to the old days, the water-colored, grainy memories of many years ago; and so it is today.
My recall landed me in the forever ago years of sixth grade, and my recently acquired obsession with finding a girl-friend. I’m sure that while some of these promptings were biologic, there was also this: I wanted to fit in, have ‘bragging rights’; I wanted everyone to know that John M. Garvin, Jr., despite all odds and appearances, had a sweetie, a woman, a chick. I guess I felt it would elevate my social standing. I approached my challenge with the panting breath of adolescence.
Although I gave Senior high women a breathless appraisal, I concluded they would sooner suffer chronic body-odor than to be seen with a sixth grader. So I began to scope out the girls closer to my grade, rank, and station.
Bit by bit, I timidly approached them all very gradually, building up to the idea of them dating me. From their expressions, you would think they had suddenly encountered a Sasquatch. Their response was unanimous. One of them spoke for the group when she said something about only dating carbon-based life forms. I didn’t know what that meant, but I took it as a ‘No.”
An emphatic, irreversible ‘No.’
Well! In those days, when I thought of having a girlfriend, it was in the abstract. I didn’t have to like her, or she me, I just wanted to proclaim to my small world that I had a love interest; that I was spoken for; had been grabbed off the market by some discriminating young lady with a keen appreciation of my potential; in short, that I was ‘normal.’
I shared my conundrum with my buddy, Steve. I was contemptibly fainthearted on the subject of the fair sex, so he took the ‘whip hand,’ determined to solve my dilemma.
He went to a different school than mine, and knew a few girls there. Add to this the fact that he knew all there was to know about girls, this fact attested to by himself, although it was not sworn testimony.
Steve’s idea [which preceded telemarketing by decades] was we should call a few of them, and, sight-unseen, ask them if they wanted to go steady with me, also sight-unseen. I believe this is where the phrase, ‘The blind leading the blind’ came into common English usage.
Well, we neared the end of this telephone survey with no takers, in fact, without being needlessly exact, we were down to our last candidate to be the love of my life, a woman I couldn’t have picked out of a police line-up, never having laid eyes on her and all. Her name was Janet Babbage. If I could but entice her to become romantically involved with a boy she’d never met, I could crow about my triumph, walk around school all puffed up. “Oh, yeah, I’ve got a girlfriend over at Tudbury High.” I imagined that the mere mention of Tudbury would evoke mysterious, exotic images of both the school and Janet. I warmed to reveries of me standing in front of a school-wide gathering, feigning regret, and announcing to all the girls, “Sorry ladies, but you had your chance.”
Also, there was this: Janet and I could maybe date when I got my learner’s permit in three years.
Well, the upshot of that afternoon’s efforts was that Janet accepted my offer! [She evidently saw nothing irrational in teaming up for life with a complete stranger.] However, my father took issue: Having told him what we were up to, he looked at me as if I was an invading alien life form, and quashed the whole deal.
Thus, I was left alone on Earth to wander desolate hills and forgotten valleys; to retire to my darkened room, write moody poetry and drink Woolite all by my forlorn little self. As it turned out, I didn’t develop an exclusive relationship until college. I would have called her my ‘steady’ except with all those other guys she was dating, I wasn’t so sure. But that’s another tale.
– Lucky Garvin
