I’d
had my eye on Mary Immaculata McGrew since the Christmas dance. I would step
out the door on a clear and crisp winter evening and gaze up at the moon,
imagining a bright faced Mary Immaculata smiling down on me. I struck up a
conversation with the real girl one snowy January afternoon at the bus stop.
“Do
you play football, Miss,” I said to her.
“You
don’t have to call me ‘Miss,’ Dave. We’ve
been in the same school since the fourth grade.”
“Yes,
M’am.”
“Call
me Immy,” she said. “Everyone does.”
“Yes,
M’am.”
“And
no, I don’t play football. I couldn’t carry the ball and my dolls at the same
time.”
“The
coach wouldn’t like that, Miss.”
Immy
looked skyward and then walked away.
Which was too bad, because I was about to ask her if she knew Easter’s date. How we got on the subject of dolls I don’t
know.
Of
course I could have looked up the date in an almanac, but an adolescent boy
will take any ordinary chore and turn it into a great quest. Although I wouldn’t have guessed it,
opportunities for such adventures were fast disappearing as adulthood loomed on
the horizon with its boring cargo of more sensible alternatives.
Sensibility
was not a shining hallmark of my teenage years.
Half of my life took place in the real the world and the other half in
my pituitary gland as it pumped out confused hormones that argued with each
other like a pack of fighting wolves rolling around in the snow. Everything was charged with symbol and
drama. Some days I was the successful
character in a poorly written melodrama.
On other days I’d get up in the morning feeling like a doomed prisoner,
my stomach churning at the prospect of my demise, fearing my execution that
morning in front of a firing squad. Or
was it just a squad of questions aimed at me on the Geometry test at ten a.m.? Reality was a
scarce commodity. A molehill might
appear as a mountain and a mountain might not even be noticed. A mind trying to find its way from boyhood to
manhood seldom follows a logical route.
My
brain’s cortex was ill prepared to
understand how the path of the moon around the earth and the sun could produce
a floating holiday on a calendar where everything else was fixed solid by the
sun.
I
suppose it’s entirely possible I decided to fathom the moon’s motions as a
substitute for my deeper need of figuring out women. No mere boy could understand
the feminine and so the problem assumed the guise of figuring out the universe,
maybe an easier task. But a telltale sign
of a deeper meaning became obvious: the way I saw the moon, a round orb representing
a female face or whatever, dancing around the earth to a 28 day cycle.
In
each Thought Experiment I tried to envision the moon’s travel, but Easter continued
to hop around the calendar and tease me.
The moon’s capricious female nature refused to fall in line and take a
permanent slot on the more regimented and masculine Gregorian calendar. Even
the formula for Easter’s date made no sense to me: “The First Sunday after the
Paschal Full Moon following the March equinox.”
What the heck was a Paschal Full Moon?
Of
course, I didn’t give the path of the moon anywhere near the amount of thought
I managed to spend on various aspects of young women. A huge number of Thought Experiments did not
lessen my interest in them. I certainly
sensed the tension they caused in my young life. But here’s something I may not have realized
at the time: the mutual frisson needed for both of us to shine.
As
we got closer to Easter, Immy approached me to ask a couple of dumb questions …
whether I liked a new song on the radio
or if I’d seen a particular television show.
“I
don’t watch television,” I lied, “because at night I communicate with beings on
another planet.”
“Are
they relatives or just friends?” she said.
““They
have much more fun up there. They go fishing rather than sit in school all
day.”
“That’s
terrible,” she said. “They’ll never amount to anything in life.”
“I
don’t know why I’m having this conversation with you,” I said. “A woman
wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh,
I understand perfectly.”
"If
you understood perfectly," I
said, "you would agree with me!"
“That’s
ridiculous.” .
“You
women think you can dance around and have holidays on any old date,” I
said. “You may have captured Easter but
you’re not getting Christmas. It will
always be on December 25th.
Forever!”
For
some reason, she stopped talking to me again.
In February the school held a Talent Show and Immy
performed a solo ballet on the stage. It
surprised me to see her name on the printed program as I sat in a front row
seat where I’d come to heckle a friend when his turn came to play the
guitar. Immy came out from behind the
curtain red faced with stage fright. Her
first movements appeared stiff and arthritic.
But soon she was lost in the movements of her body. So was I.
I
can still see Immy in my mind’s eye. Her
limbs and torso were boyish compared to what they would grow into, but her
movements were that of a graceful woman.
My God, I thought, she is a beautiful liquid. I wanted to stand up and
hold her before she flowed away.
Later
that night I dreamed of the moon and Immy, both somehow joined together as a
mythic fairy in the forest, peeking around the earth as if it were a giant
tree, teasing the sun to shine forth with his strength to illuminate her more
brilliantly. To be her best, she needed his attention, his strong light. To fulfill his purpose, he needed to light
her up.
Immy
occupied almost all of my thoughts after that night. Most of the time I avoided her, although I didn’t
know why. I may have been stuck on the
problem of why I wanted her to notice me while at the same time wished she
would leave me alone.
I
finally made up my mind to speak to her.
Spring had arrived and it was just before Easter of 1957, which turned
out splendidly, occurring on April 21, 1957. I walked up as she waited for the bus after
school. I had thought about this for
days and planned to say something witty, like, “I saw you on the stage. You danced like it left town without you.”
A
warm breeze fluffed her hair as she sat on the bench reading. She looked up
when I walked over and stood before her.
There was so much in her eyes. I
couldn’t calculate all of it as my thoughts raced around in my addled brain. I thought of the fairy peeking around the
tree at the sun. Saying nothing, I
simply smiled down at her. She smiled
back, bringing a broad grin across my face. I sat down next to her on the bench
and kept quiet, what I do best but not often.
I did nothing but grin like an idiot.
Her bus came before mine, and as she stood to board it, she said in a soft
voice I would always remember. “Be nice to me.” It was the same voice and the same look in her
eyes she would give me ten years later on the morning we were married.
copyright 2014 by David Griffin
The Windswept
Press
Murrells Inlet, South Carolina
dave@windsweptpress.com
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