Everyone remembers their first true love. Well, maybe not true love, as in, requited….
Let me rephrase that. Everyone remembers the first unrequited love. It takes time, this love, first to build up a person you don’t really know onto a platform of holy cuteness, the pinnacle of perfection, the object of your hearts truest desire.
My first crush was on Paul Anderson, the new kid from Alaska. At least he was new in about fourth grade, which in kid years is SUPER NEW because you’ve known all the same kids since kindergarten and although some move away, mostly everything just stayed the same. So, yeah, the new kid. He was easy to look at, tall dark and handsome, and the most important thing, no one had yet warned him about what a dork I was, so he talked to me. I had flown under the radar long enough to not be the recent butt of the joke, so he regarded me as another human, not “that weird red-headed kid that once pretended her grandmother’s stole was a cat and brought it to school.” Uh, wait. Never mind, that’s another story.
Paul liked sports, especially football. This was something I could relate to, as everyone in my family always had football on T.V. in the background, at all times. I grew up in Wisconsin, remember? Packers=love. So we could talk football. We were also a bit class-clowny, probably because we were both avoiding doing any actual math. I laughed at his jokes. I laughed at his drawings. I laughed when he stabbed himself with a pencil by accident, but then quickly stopped laughing when I realized he was bleeding and needed to go to the hospital. (He had actual lead removed, it was a pretty stupid thing to stab yourself in the leg, but, ultimately, he won everyone’s respect for this.) Paul was a Steeler’s fan, which he proudly displayed to the world with his shiny black bomber jacket, logo emblazoned on the sleeve. I too became a Steeler’s fan. Why not? The Packers would understand. My Dad, however, was a bit puzzled, when I asked for a shiny white Steeler’s jacket for my birthday (i.e. the GIRL version) rather than the gilded gold and green of the Packers. The jacket arrived, surprisingly, as gifts were often close but not quite what you actually wanted. I was thrilled! I too, was an official Steeler’s fan! We were practically married!
Yeah…
At this point, it all started to go downhill. My perfectly planned romance with the Alaskan King of Dimples deteriorated rather rapidly. No one had told me about the rule where you do not tread on the dude-you-like’s turf. In other words, don’t buy a matching jacket, unless you are truly and officially said dude’s girlfriend. My jacket did garner some attention, that’s true. My nemesis (everyone has one) decided to take it upon herself to go and inform Paul of my recent acquisition, and POINT TO ME while telling him…. well, I have no idea what she told him, actually. I just knew it was no good. It was bad in fact, really bad, as he was shooting a nasty look my way. He took off his jacket and threw it on the ground, and went back to playing football in the near freezing weather in only a t-shirt.
Huh.
The sinking realization that I had broken some unspoken rule came crashing down. Whatever brief love that might have been, was never to become. I did have one last stab at it though. In the summer, I had been playing in an abandoned foundation of a house (where else would a kid be in the summer but some strange slightly dangerous place) and I found the biggest toad ever. As in, really, really, Mega-Huge. This was a massive win of some sort, I just knew it, like finding the Holy Grail of Grossness. I hoisted the Toad up, scrambled up the embankment, and brought it directly to Paul’s house.
(You might have heard this story before, forgive my early onset Alzheimer’s)
I rang the doorbell and Paul answered. I said, “Look what I found!” and held out my awesome offering, to which his eyes truly did light up. Despite trying to get his dog to eat it, we had lots of fun seeing how fast it tried to get away from us. At some point we must have felt bad about this, because we returned it to the foundation, where we played for most of the afternoon. All was forgotten, all was forgiven. We were friends again, and that really was enough for me. Because honestly, who wants to date a guy who tried to feed a toad to his dog? Even I could see that was a problem. The very next week a FOR SALE sign was up in his front lawn, and he moved away, without a goodbye or a lot of fanfare. Any chance at romance was over. The Steelers jacket stayed in the closet, a reminder of what was never to be, much to the consternation of my Dad, who didn’t understand why I wanted it in the first place.
Obviously, since he’s making brats here, we’d still be friends.