Los Gatos Weekly-Times

How the years can fade away in an instant

By Carl Heintze

Her name is unimportant, but let's call her Nostalgia. Nostalgia and I grew up in the same small town. We went to the same schools from kindergarten through high school. Thus I remember her first as small and dark-haired with brown, almost black eyes, what has been described as a heart-shaped face, a voice pitched lower than many girls' with a laugh to match and a disposition or personality that allowed her to laugh frequently.

She grew, but this first image remains in my mind. She was the first female I ever knowingly loved aside from my mother.

It was her laugh perhaps more than anything which made me remember her. Where I was solemn, she was not. Where I found the world dark, she thought it bright and broadcast that brightness with her smile. To me she became that, the best of life, a passage of poetry, a certain summer night, the world before I knew that it contained war, death and disaster, a definition of what childhood was, not what adulthood could become.

But though I worshipped her, I could not say we were even friends. In the small town where we lived, naturally enough, we knew one another by first name so I suppose we could be called friends, but many other boys were closer to her. Indeed, it seemed to me that she played queen to a kind of male court, teasing them, challenging them but never admitting one of them to sole favor.

I existed somewhere on the outside of this palace guard, admiring from afar but not approaching. We were in the same classes in high school, but we never shared homework. I never carried her books home nor wrote her notes nor kept trysts with her after school.

Indeed, I was in her home only once.

As we grew older, I never "took her out," as the saying went then. I danced with her at school dances only twice, both times when we were seniors. It seemed to me then she floated in my arms, like a banner that streamed away from me in the wind, weightless and beautiful. And yet there also came from her a magic warmth, a presence I had never felt before. She also sang in my ear, sang the tune the orchestra was playing and laughed and patted my check once as if she was genuinely delighted that we were together.

The memory of those dances lived with me in the years that came afterward. But they were to be only memories.

When we finished high school, we both left our native town, never to be its residents again. In time, she married and raised a family, as I did. I heard that she had married a lawyer, something I thought strange, I know not why, and lived in Maryland or perhaps North Carolina.

In time, too, the thought of her, the reminder of what had been, receded. Only now and then something or someone would bring her back. Once, I saw a cellist in a symphony orchestra who seemed at a distance to be her and, once in San Francisco I followed someone down a street who I thought must surely be her, but, of course, I was wrong. The face was not the same, nor was the smile or the laughter.

As I grew older, I eventually gave up and was left with only images of those days, that face, that person, that time and all it had meant. I no longer even seemed able to find a hint of her.

Then one day, years afterward, half a century later, my high school class, or what was left of it, gathered for a reunion in the town in which we had all once lived. We gathered not at the school itself, but at a nearby country club, there to try to recognize one another, to attempt to recall who was attached to which name and to try to bridge the gap that half a century had created between us.

It was in the midst of this, in the effort to bring from today yesterday, that she suddenly appeared, unchanged so far as I could see--well, perhaps with a little gray in her hair. But her dark eyes were as intense as ever and her smile was as bright, her laughter as gay.

From across the room, she saw me and she called my name with pleasure and she came to me and put her arms around me and hugged me. And then she kissed me--as she had never done before, but as I had always wished.

And for me, for that one brief instant, the years no longer existed, and I knew I was as happy as I could ever be.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.

[ Back to Contents Page | Los Gatos Weekly-Times Home Page | Archives ]