Falling in Love for the First Time, Part 1

(Blossom Music Center, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio)

In high school, I was a late bloomer. By the end of my junior year, I was barely five and a half feet tall. I also didn’t get my driver’s license until that summer when I turned seventeen. What red-blooded Midwest American boy waits until he’s seventeen to start driving? Similarly, I was behind the curve when it came to girls. I was definitely interested in them but lacked the self-confidence needed to walk up to a girl and talk to her, ask her to dance with me, invite her to Isaly’s to get an ice cream or Altieri’s to get a pizza or Loew’s State Theatre in Cuyahoga Falls to see Summer of ‘42. I guess I was just so in awe of their physical presence, their beauty, their girlness, and I didn’t know what to do with that awe. I was girl-shy.

This problem may have been somewhat compounded by the fact that I attended an all-boys Jesuit high school, although that didn’t seem to hinder most of my classmates. There was a “sister school,” the all-girls Our Lady of the Elms High School, just a twenty-minute drive away. When Elms girls would come over after school to help us decorate for a dance, a special vibrational energy permeated the campus on the appearance of those blue-and-green tartan skirts with the rolled up waistbands. I think we had all developed a grudging appreciation for single-gender education, but, my god, we missed girls.

My situation vis-à-vis girls began to change by my senior year. I’d grown six inches that previous summer and developed a kind of urgency – a combination of biological imperative and imagined peer pressure. I made a mad rush at Joanne Steffek, a pretty dark-haired girl from the East Akron neighborhood of Goodyear Heights, who seemed to be sending me a signal of her interest. A series of dismally embarrassing phone calls and a few feeble visits to her home ended that. I was so nervous around girls that I occasionally wondered whether dating was worth the trouble. By the spring, something promising was developing with Kathy M—, a cute West Akron girl with sad green eyes and long straight Susan Dey hair. But in making a move on her, I cut in front of my friend Carl Johnson, and (in the messed-up way the mind sometimes works) my repressed guilt for doing that made me act less than my best with Kathy. That romance quickly fizzled.

But in the meantime, I was starting to kindle some true friendships with girls – Cheryl Schlemmer, Patty Burkley, Debbie Ukraniec, Bobbie Cook – mostly the girlfriends of my buddies. I began to appreciate that I could share parts of myself with them that were harder to share with my male friends. Such as, the sensitive poet part, I guess. In any case, a carload of us guys ignored the senior prom, driving around that night, getting high and arguing about whether The Rolling Stones or The Who was the greatest rock band. And yet, some part of us wished we were getting dressed up and going out to dinner and pinning a corsage just above the left breast of the girl with whom we were currently in love.

That summer marked the end of one thing and the beginning of the next. Most everyone was thinking about heading off to college somewhere. I got a job working for the Summit County Roads Department, working around Twinsburg Township. I learned how to handle a wide-scoop shovel and throw a scoop of gravel so that it spread evenly over fresh tar. I learned how to handle the scythes and beat-up mowers as we trimmed the grass around guardrails. I also learned how to lean on that shovel so it looked like I was doing something when there was nothing to do. Occasionally I did work hard. And at the end of the day, I would often head out to Blossom Music Center. An outdoor music venue located in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Blossom had opened just a few years earlier. An enclosed stage and pavilion extended to a long sloping hillside that could fit over 20,000 music fans. The lawn seating was cheap, you could bring in coolers filled with beer and wine, and many of the bands were worth seeing. (I saw Janis Joplin there in 1969.) We kids exerted our presence, permeating the hillside like the sweet cloud of hundreds of joints being fired up.

On one of those nights, near the end of a concert – it might’ve been Leon Russell playing piano and singing “We're alone now and I am singing this song for you” – a bunch of us were kicking back, sharing a big blanket on the hillside, most coupled up. I was sitting with Bobbie. That was cool; I liked Bobbie. She was smart and funny and generous, tough-minded, not delicate, and she had the best smile. We had hung out a lot, and I was completely at ease with her. I may have laid my head on her lap, or we may have just snuggled up under the cooling night air, but suddenly we were kissing. I don’t know if I started it, or she did. Perhaps it was mutual. It didn’t matter. We kissed as if we'd never kissed before (which was not far from the truth for me). And by the end of the concert, as we headed off to a car parked in some distant field, rolled blankets under our arms, I was thinking to myself, My god, why have I never noticed how attractive Bobbie is? Of course, the attraction had as much to do with who she was as with how she looked. And then I thought to myself, So this is how it feels to fall in love. It felt sweet, so out of the blue, so easy. All I knew is that I wanted to be with her as much as possible. 

Thus began our late summer romance, which as I recall, consisted of me getting off work and showering and going over to her house in Silver Lake whenever I could. Maybe I ate dinner with her family – she had six siblings and a great mom and they were a fun household. Maybe we watched some TV. Later in the evening we’d go to her father’s study – the massive desk and dark leather couch and built-in bookcases of a lawyer – and talk about the futures unfolding before us. She was heading off to the University of Denver, and I’d decided to head to Pennsylvania to do volunteer work with Jon Prochnow and Mike Rukstelis for a Catholic order called Glenmary Home Missioners. And then we would make out, Bobbie taking me on these intimate expeditions, leading me to all the bases (except home – I did say we were in her father’s study). I will forever praise the good fortune of falling in love with a friend.

Soon enough, she was heading out west and I was heading back east. And long letters would have to carry our feelings until Christmas. Bobbie was an excellent correspondent. When I think back on this, I realize she gave me an amazing gift. I knew that she was worthy of someone’s love and far readier to love someone than I was. I often mistrust memories of myself, the way we all tend to unconsciously edit out our least graceful moments. I was a typical eighteen-year-old boy, but I like to think I offered something more, that I was worth loving too.