Changes come around real soon

Day 5 of a 10-day blog journey to my 60th birthday.
My top 20 songs. My top 10 memories. Senioritis today.

             It is primarily a shame that one of the greatest nights – heck, Springs-- of my life came when I was 17 years old, a senior in high school. In no way should one peak before the living is done.

            My high school played the biggest high school in the state, unbeaten Meridian High, in baseball. And won. We painted the score on a huge smokestack on the campus of Meridian afterwards (oops, a confession). And I was in the midst of a relationship, my first real relationship, and times were as sweet as cotton candy at the Mississippi-Alabama State Fair.
            I’ve known unadulterated joy like that few times since, sadly. Nothing in college, in work, in life apart from marriages and child births gave me the rush that winning a dumb baseball game did.

            But it was also about the time my emotions were roaring like storms on the horizons. I didn’t know it, but I was coming down with something, something thrilling and deadly. Something we all probably in one for or another contracted. I, to quote ol’ B.J. Thomas, was hooked on a feeling.

            Do you know that feeling? I suspect most do. The feeling when you get up in the morning that you’re going to do or see someone who will increase your heartbeat, increase your smile just by existing?

            I strongly suspect that kind of thing happens, well, once. I’ve been in deep love with my wife for 28 years, but there is something about the first time love is written on your heart in a way that is uncommon.

            In My Sister’s Keeper, Jodi Picoult writes … I am suddenly seventeen again - the year I realize that love doesn't follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable”

The truth is, like many, I fell head over heels for someone, and learned a great lesson: love even at its finest is risky. To love is to acknowledge the possibility of losing, hurting, failing.

The Bible says of love, it “Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end”

            First love’s end comes much more quickly than we ever could imagine it would.

              Oh, as a teenager, I thought I fell deeply in love about five times. Fell out of love four times fairly quickly. The fifth was a hard one to get over.

            Many have tried to describe it. Some succeed.

            Tammara Webber in the book Where You Are writes, ““Something about first love defies duplication. Before it, your heart is blank. Unwritten. After, the walls are left inscribed and graffitied. When it ends, no amount of scrubbing will purge the scrawled oaths and sketched images, but sooner or later, you find that there’s space for someone else, between the words and in the margins.”

            Anna Godbersen says of it, “The first stab of love is like a sunset, a blaze of color -- oranges, pearly pinks, vibrant purples...”

            It was all those things and more.

            It happened late in my senior year of high school and stunted me all the way through my first year of college. My freshman year of college I really did nothing to participate. Just showed up, went to class, did most of my work, and went to see my girlfriend.

            I had little ambition. Little desire to do anything else. I got a job working at a corner drug store that was next to the building that housed the local newspaper. But otherwise, nothing.

            I even got engaged, sort of, kind of. Bought a ring, on credit. But my girlfriend was too young, still in high school, and I was nuts about, well, everything.

            At least in small part because I didn’t want to be away, I went to Meridian Junior College near Oakland Heights in Meridian, and most of my friends went to East Mississippi Junior College, about 40 miles from home. I spent the day lonely, even driving all the way downtown to get lunch most days because I was scared someone would sit at my table in the cafeteria.

            Someone once said, “Everybody says the first cut is the deepest. It’s so true. I don’t know if it’s because it’s the best love, but it’s the first that you remember. You hold on to that, just that first experience, it’s good to have and you should appreciate it, even if it hurts.”

            I appreciated it, but in the end, like most of these things, it fizzled. Or hit a wall. She went on vacation the summer between my first year of college and second, and discovered something that would turn out to be haunting. She discovered other boys. Her words exactly. And she broke up with me.

            Stephen King writes, ““True love, like any other strong and addicting drug, is boring — once the tale of encounter and discovery is told, kisses quickly grow stale and caresses tiresome… except, of course, to those who share the kisses, who give and take the caresses while every sound and color of the world seems to deepen and brighten around them. As with any other strong drug, true first love is really only interesting to those who have become its prisoners. And, as is true of any other strong and addicting drug, true first love is dangerous.”

            So, suddenly alone, completely and totally alone, I ventured into the second year of college.

            And everything changed.       

SONGS FOR THE DAY....

JACK AND DIANE
JOHN MELLENCAMPGonna let it rock,
let it roll
Let the Bible belt come and save my soul
Hold on to 16 as long as you can
Changes come around real soon
Make us women and men

Oh, yeah, life goes on
Long after the thrill of livin is gone

YOUR SONG
ELTON JOHNSo excuse me forgetting but these things I do
You see I've forgotten if they're green or they're blue
Anyway the thing is what I really mean
Yours are the sweetest eyes I've ever seen