I suppose I was like most guys who grew up in my post WWII era, totally clueless and inept about the ‘other’ gender. Those of the female persuasion not only struck us losers as being from another planet, they seemed to come from another galaxy located on the other side of the cosmos. My interactions with this alien life form ranged from the mildly amusing to the outright pathetic.

I won’t bore you with the litany of disasters that beset my bumbling attempts to ‘get to second base‘ since ‘scoring‘ so to speak seemed beyond the known laws of probability in that era. Come to think on it, the odds never improved all that much after that but they did get marginally better. You would spend weeks trying to decipher the clues or ‘tells’ that you were told existed. What would happen if you asked her out or ‘made a move.‘ Great thought went into what might constitute interest in your object of desire that included discussions with the other hapless and clueless guys with whom you shared your ignorance.

It mattered not. When you screwed up your courage, the end was the same … “go out with you! I would rather eat crushed glass.’” The kinder ones might use the familiar dodge of the grandmother passing on (for the 8th time that month) or the dog needing to be washed that night (cleanest dog in town). I’m still scarred from these early memories!

In truth, I did marry a wonderful gal. We would have celebrated 50 years of marriage this past December had she not passed away last summer. It was a remarkably happy union. The fact that a shotgun was employed at the marriage ceremony should be ignored. She never discovered that the shotgun I used to envourage her to say ‘I do‘ was not real. Here we are just before I pulled out the shotgun.

But we are talking about my early ‘love’ life here … memories that rival my root canal work and my prostate biopsies for personal pain.

Let’s see. There was one real girlfriend in high school. I don’t know how I got her. My best guess is that I was her penance for imagined sins she had committed. All I know is that she committed NO SINS with me But we did laugh a lot. Okay, she laughed at me when I tried being romantic. Here we are on prom night. Maribeth eventually got a Doctorate in Literature but I lost track and never found out what she accomplished in life.

After my brief attempt at becoming a saint, I went to a college known as a den of ‘atheists and communists.’ Even better, there were few Catholic broads. I thought I would be in erotic heaven. But no, you can take the klutz out of his religious straightjacket but the retraints are still there.

Yet, I managed to stumble upon two serious female acquaintances. I cannot say lovers but we spent a great deal of time together.

This was Carol. She caught my attention because she wasn’t Catholic … being Jewish in fact. She had another point in her favor. She was already engaged to some schmuck who was in the military serving in Alaska. This was perfect for a commitment phobic guy like me. No threat of anything ‘serious.‘ But I liked her a lot. She was smart as a whip, ranked 1st in our class I believe. I thought if I hung around her my grades might improve by some form of osmosis. That didn’t work but we had deep and wonderful conversations. She went on to Harvard for her doctorate and later became a Dean at Rutgers.

Then there was the ‘love’ of my early life:

Here is Lee when she graduated from Clark. She was the one gal from those years with whom I experienced a ‘Hallmark’ moment … seeing her from across the crowded room and ‘falling in love.‘ I don’t recommend that for anyone. It still took me weeks to make my patented move which she rejectd but nicely (no threat to eat crushed glass). After being ‘shot down’ (which I should have been used to by then), I hid in a closet for weeks. For once in my pathetic life, though, I tried again (I must have been smitten). It worked, she just had to work through her guilt than involved a guy from back home who was pursuing her.

I won’t bore you with the tragic story. Neither of us were healthy enough to talk about our feelings. When the time came to put up or shut up, I wandered off to the other side of the world (India). Amazingly, I did raise the issue of marriage in letters but in rather oblique ways. She made the sensible decision of marrying a post doc while working at Harvard.

That should be the end of that but it wasn’t quite the end. After some 4 decades of no contact, I stumbled across her on Facebook and reached out. We were able to have all the conversation through cyberspace that we never had in person while in school. She went through two marriages and was happy in the second, which pleased me greatly. She also earned a doctorate, in some hard science subject like micro-virology or something I do not understand.

The far more important thing is that it turned out she did love me. She had kept evrything I had sent her from India in fact, or given her in college. But she was Greek Orthodox (who unfortunately are very much like Catholics) and therefore had been as neurotic back then as I was. All this mattered not since she was soon to pass away from cancer. But I found the knowledge that we shared an unexpressed love in the early days very comforting for some reason. I hadn’t been rejected, not really.

Hmmm! Perhaps I wasn’t as loathesome as I had feared for all these years. We just may have been two ships destined to pass one another in the fog of youth.

There was something similar about all four women. They were whip smart, witty, independent, and (most important of all) had no standards when it came to men. I would like to think that, were I to do it all over again, that I would do things differently. But that is BS! I’d still be hapless, no doubt about it.

Below is the ill-starred Don Juan in those days. If interested, I explore my early years at length in A CLUELESS REBEL.