The Notepad at My Bedside
For a couple of decades now, the last thing I see when I turn off my bedside light is the notepad on my nightstand. There have been dozens of notepads over the years. Some are dog-eared and stored in boxes in my basement. Lines in others have become phrases and ideas in articles and novels. I expect were it not for the notepad at my bedside, my writing career would have ended before it began. Despite happy relationships and marriages, many women and men have never come to closure with a lover who got away.
More often than not, their memories focus on the happy times they spent together. The memory has an uncanny knack for remembering the magical moments and forgetting the struggles, disagreements, bad habits and worse that led to the breakup.
Often the one that got away was a first love. Having been young together brings the memory of any easier life, perhaps free of high pressure jobs, financial struggles, and childcare. First love defies reason – sometimes, for a lifetime.
I’d spent decades dreaming of my high school boyfriend who many years ago had crossed the Canadian border to avoid the Vietnam draft. I’d stayed behind, crying my way through college. After a few letters in the early 1970s, I’d never heard from him again.
About a year ago I had a dream that we were somehow together again. I was in a place of utter joy when my alarm clock shook me awake. I looked at my husband sleeping beside me, the dogs sleeping in their doggie beds snoring softly as the first light of morning filtered into the room. I turned to my notepad and wrote about the feelings I’d had in the dream. The youth, the magic, the peace I felt in his presence.
And then I got up and, instead of writing an almost due article on Is There a Right Time to Go Gray? I did what most of us do when flooded by memories of a long ago love. I googled him. The only reference I found was on whitepages.com. It showed a current address in North Carolina. That address was preceded by 4 addresses in that state and three on Long Island dating back to his mother’s address in the town where we grew up. The site also listed possible relatives. The names included his mother and sister. In addition, there were three female names that I expected were a wife and two daughters.
I clicked on another link of his name on the page. It led to a site that promised to reveal marriage and divorce records, arrest records, employment history, and more – for a price. If the site had information on the selected person in a given category, a check appeared beside the category. Despite the decades that had passed, when a green check appeared beside arrest records, it felt like a punch in the stomach.
I closed the page as if it were poison. Curiosity compelled me to get the facts, but I didn’t want to know. I wanted to remember the sweet young man. An update providing criminal activities in his later years would burst my bubble big time. He’d broken my heart so many years before. I wasn’t going to give him another chance.
