It was twenty years ago today.....

I'm the type of person who remembers names, dates, etc. with little to no effort. I'm also a very sentimental sort of fellow. Sentimental to my own detriment at times. Anyway, I was thinking about where I was twenty years ago today and how much my life has changed in the ensuing two decades that have passed. I now have two wonderful children that I could not have fathomed all those years ago and yet I still sometimes long to do it all again. To go back to that time and place and to see those people again just one more time.
March 30,1988 was a very exciting day for me. I was a senior at my high school with only two months left before graduation. I had been somewhat shy for most of high school days but during the last several months of my senior year I had begun to come out of my shell and do the social networking thing. I made lots of friendships during the last three or four months of my senior year but there was one thing I could not seem to get no matter how hard I tried. That one thing that I wanted so desperately was the love of a girl two grades below me.
Her name was Wendy and our paths had crossed for the first time back in January of 1988 in my library science class. I had spotted her on the couch softly crying. She was strikingly attractive with the classic combination of blonde hair and blue eyes. This was her first year at our school. She had moved to our town with her mother and brother at the end of the previous after being raised and bred in some northern town I can't recall the name of. The reason for her sadness was a combination of homesickness and some cruel remarks that had been made in jest regarding her northern accent. It was more than she could take and she had broken down.
I sat down beside her on the couch in our library. We talked for a moment or two and then she left. I had tried to make her feel better and she seemed to be in better spirits when she left. During the next several days I found I couldn't get her off my mind no matter how hard I tried. I knew in my heart of hearts that a girl like that was simply out of my league but you couldn't convince a romantic fool like myself of this.
Imagine my surprise when I found her sitting at my kitchen table along with my sister and my next door neighbor some three days later. As luck would have it, my next door neighbor had developed quite a friendship with Wendy unbeknownst to me. It wasn't long before I began my daily ritual of interrogating my neighbor to keep myself up to date on Wendy's love life.
Through my next door neighbor I found out that, no, Wendy did not have a boyfriend. I also found out through my neighbor all about Wendy's likes and dislikes. Especially her musical tastes, which I'll come back to later.
In no time at all I mustered up the courage to get my neighbor to deliver a note to Wendy. In the note I simply asked if she would consider going to the senior prom with me. She promptly replied saying the thing was she would not be going with anyone that year, but thanks for asking anyway. Well, that was my first plan to win her heart and it had surely backfired. Back to the drawing board.
Her visits to our house became more and more frequent. I became so enamored with her when she was visiting our place I found I couldn't even hold solid food down. I had been slightly overweight before I had met Wendy and, up until meeting her, had paid little attention to diet. With my appetite dwindling more and more everyday it wasn't long before the pounds melted off. I went from 178 pounds/36 inch waist down to 138/32 waist in just over a month and a half. Later on I would credit her with inadevertently getting me to come out of my fat coma and start keeping myself in shape but at the time I gave no thought to that. I just knew she was wrecking me emotionally. I was so smitten with her and there was nothing I could do about it.
It didn't help matters that one of my coworkers at my part time job lived in the apartment next to hers. There seemed to be some connection to her everywhere I went.
It wasn't long before I came up with a plan. I knew Wendy loved the group Aerosmith. Aerosmith was in the midst of a monstrous comeback after nearly a decade spent in an alcohol and drug induced stupor and their tour was selling out everywhere they were going. They were clean, sober, and had a massive hit on their hands with the song "Angel". Of course, it goes without saying that the lyrics to the song pretty well summed up my feelings for Wendy at the time but I digress. The point of the story is that Aerosmith was on their way to the Charlotte coleseum and would be performing there on March 30, 1988 with their opening act, White Lion, another favorite of Wendy's. My plan was now complete.
My plan was to buy three tickets to the show. One for Wendy and I and another ticket for my neighbor. I assumed Wendy wouldn't consider it a date if my neighbor tagged along and the drive down to Charlotte would provide the perfect opportunity for the two of us to get to know each other better in a non pressure situation. Along the way, I would try to win her over with my personality since I felt that I most likely wasn't up to her physical standards and I felt this was my only chance of wooing her.
My neighbor agreed to buy her own ticket and she ran the plan by Wendy. Wendy agreed, I went down to purchase the tickets ($17.50 each back then and a lot of scratch for a 17 year old, minimum wage kid) and we were all set to go on that Friday. I even talked my mom into writing a note to get me out of class early so I could slick up my dad's 1977 Chevy Silverado that I routinely drove to school.
That afternoon, after fininshing the wash job on my truck, I walked outside as the school bus deposited my neighbor in front of her house. I could tell by the look on my neighbor's face as she got off the school bus she had bad news to report. I had known in my heart all along that my plans would somehow be thwarted before they ever came to fruition and this was the confirmation I was waiting for. No, Wendy wouldn't be able to make it. Her brother had a fever, her mother had to work, and there was no way out of her babysitting chores. Later on I would find out that Wendy had, in reality, stayed home to partake in some underage consumption of alcoholic beverages with a notorious party girl from our school she was known to sometimes keep company. This was where the truth of the matter lay but again, I digress.
As for me, I was heartbroken and beyond depressed. My neighbor quickly came up with a plan to invite our neighbor from across the street and the three of us went on anyway. We even stopped off and had dinner along the way. We had a nice enough time, had a few laughs on the drive, and listened to pop tunes on our journey. I can remember hearing "Rocket 2 U" by The Jets in particular. And the concert itself was a pleasant diversion. It was my first experience at a rock concert and, being the naive and sheltered small town boy I was, I saw and smelled things (I'm thinking of the open smoking of weed in a public place here) I had never experienced before. It was fun enough, I just wished Wendy had been there on that night some twenty years ago.
As for me, the answer to the question is, no, I never did get a date with Wendy. Probably for the best. Had we dated, gotten serious, and married it most likely would have ended in divorce. You know, the old mixing oil and water thing. She's married now and moved on. She left our town the next year and moved on to Salisbury, though she still used to come and visit my neighbors for years after she left on weekends. We even used to see her at our place from time to time. She was always pleasant enough but you could tell she probably thought I was pond scum. I'm told she still lives in Salisbury and she's still pretty as ever. At least that's what my neighbor says.