I’ve never been much of a Facebook person, but like a lot of boomers I opened an account to stay in touch with the next generation. I’ve yet to hit double digits in posts, and I’ve largely resisted diving down the rabbit hole of memory or into the daily personal lives of hundreds of online friends. Nonetheless, my email account nags me, in dozens of posts per day, to check Facebook for this or that message or news. Once in awhile, I succumb.
Am I sorry I did? No. But what I read hasn’t left me.
I learned that a wonderful woman, a tall and beautiful girl when I knew her and queen of my high school prom, had died of cancer. We’d had, I believe, two dates – and if we ever kissed, it was on the cheek. But we talked often and stayed friends. I always expected that I’d run into her again someday.
Neither of us were destined to stay in that decaying steel town on the lake, and we didn’t. Decades later, at a reunion, I asked about her. “She thought about coming but said there was only one person she cared about seeing, and she didn’t think you’d be here,” one of her closest friends said.
I lived with those words close to my heart for years.
The closing of that door and the ever-deepening awareness of mortality stayed with me. Indeed it’s yet to leave. But then, through the same chain of high school friend to high school friend, none of whom I’ve spoken with in decades, I learned that two more loves of my early life had also died.
I only dated a half-dozen or so girls in high school, only two of them at length and seriously. Both of those did me the favor of breaking my heart. I treasure both, and they are still alive. But the girl I took on my first date, a ringer for Natalie Wood, had died as had the next girl I dated.
I slid into a strange sadness and wondered at the depth of my feelings, almost a half century later, the almost visceral memory of the crazed passion and intensity of young love.
I’ve been held at gunpoint only twice in my life. Both times I was with a girl I dated in high school.
Once I was parked far out on a country road with a girl when my car became hopelessly mired in spring mud. Curfews. No cell phones. 2 a.m. or later.
We walked hand in hand in the dark to a farmhouse with a light on. I knocked and asked to use the phone. A grumpy farmer told me to wait a minute and then held a shotgun at the ready as I called a friend to come and pick us up.
The other time I was with Karen and we too broke curfew, as we well knew.
I drove her home and she told me just to drop her off because her father would be drunk. But no self-respecting boy-man would do such a thing in my world, and I insisted on walking her to the door.
As soon as we were on the porch, the door opened and the light came on. Her father began yelling about bringing his daughter home late, and he pointed a pistol right at me.
Karen pushed me aside and stepped between her father and me. “I know how to handle him. Leave now,” she said, and I did.
And now she, too, is dead.
The force of these memories after all these years, the sweetness and indeed love I feel toward those early fumbling partners in pursuit of life, shocked me. The feeling that we, oh so wrongly, knew what life was really about and felt it more deeply than the soul-dead adults in our lives is funny now. Sort of.
That brings me to Eric Windhurst, who in 1985, at age 17, killed the stepfather of the 15-year-old girl who told the boy that the man had been raping her.
Like Windhurst, at 17, I was a crack shot, an avid hunter who practiced regularly. I could have made that shot through the woods. Had one of those girls of long ago asked, would I have?
I know now, through remembrance of the mad passions of my unformed teen brain, that I might have.
It is madness to try to judge a 40-year-old man by the actions of his 17-year-old self. The latest research holds that the male brain is not completely formed, or as rational as it’s going to be, until age 25. Females, to no one’s surprise, get there a couple years sooner.
There is much wrong with the nation’s criminal justice system. One of them is the belief that by saying it’s so, a juvenile can be declared an adult, or that an adult can forever be held responsible for a juvenile act.
That makes as much sense as declaring that a dog is a cat.
(Ralph Jimenez is the Monitor’s editorial page writer. He can be reached at rjimenez@cmonitor.com.)