I, YOUNG CYRANO PART I

I once heard United States Poet Laureate Charles Simic own up to deciding to become a poet in high school because, not being a jock, that was the most likely, back-door alternative for him to get girls. Now of course Charles Simic wasn’t a thing yet way back when I was in school, but if he had been, that alone would’ve made him my patron saint.

For after repeatedly striking out on my own with girls, early on, I was forced to surrender to the fact I just didn’t have what it takes to go out there and… get girls. Not if I had to go about it face-to-face anyway. And no, it wasn’t an obnoxiously large Cyrano de Bergerac nose. For me it was a crippling lack of self-confidence, actually a side-effect of my not-so-mild case of first-grade P.T.S.D. (Yes, you’re probably suspecting that I’m exaggerating here. That I’m being a drama queen. That’s fair. Others have said the same. Perhaps I am. However…)

Some people stutter when they’re nervous. Me? Where talking up close and personal to cute girls was concerned, when wanting and trying to express the simple message that, yes, I “liked” them… I became a psychology-text-book, psychosomatic mute. Numb and dumb as a post.

So like Mr. Simic, I eventually had to put my faith in the old adage “the pen is mightier than the sword.” That is to say, I learned to put pen to paper, and let the paper do the talking for me, to let it say what I didn’t have the little guts to say in person. It was so much more doable like that than gazing eye-to-eye into the beautiful blue eyes of some Shirley Temple when only to discover that my tongue had gone A.W.O.L.

So I became a serial note-passer in school. (And eventually a poet of sorts.)

Read on…

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Alas, I grew up “pathologically shy” around girls. An affliction that I tend to believe came about due to an incident that occurred all the way back in first grade. Back when boys justviewedall the girls as icky and stupid and boring and nothing to worry about.

See, during one recess out there on the wintery Pleasant Street School playground, I was waiting to use the swings. And I was very frustrated because all three swing seats were taken. I’d asked the swingers if I could please have a turn.

No. Not yet. Not now. Pretty soon.

And of course recess time was fast running out.

But finally one swing did open up. So of course I trotted right on over and hoisted my little butt up onto its empty seat. But just as I was about to kick-start my swinging action, the little girl who’d just vacatedthe seat (whose name, I believe was Gloria Cole {now, I could possibly be wrong about this, but if memory serves me correctly, that was the sweet little first-grader’s name}) was suddenly back and standing right in front of me. Blocking me.

“That’s my swing,” she said.

“No,” I responded, “you left it. Remember? My turn now.”

“No. I was gonna get right back on.”

“Too bad. It’s my turn now. I called it.” (Remember ‘calling’ it?)

“I said, it’s MINE! Get offit!”

Now I mean, come on! Tell me, just what was it that she did not understand about (a) that having vacated the swing, said swing was legally up for grabs, and that (b) I was a boy and she… but a girl?

“Nope,” I told her. “I’m not getting off it becau…” PUMFF!

OW!

Whoa!

I was lying flat on my back in the dying-cockroach position and blinking at the gray skies and the bottom of the swing seat swaying emptily above me!

Now you remember don’t you, how much it stung when you got bopped in the nose as a little tyke? And how your eyes got all blinded by that stinging surge of salty tears? Well, now just try to imagine on top of that, just how confounding this all was for me. Because… according to the conventional playground wisdom,girls were weak and boys were strong. Girls were fearful and boys were brave. Girls were made of sugar and spice and everything nice, while we supposedly more-neanderthal-little boy-types were from the more reputable snakes and snails and puppy dogs’ tails mold.

Anyway I started scrambling best I could to get myself rolled over and on my knees, and get on about the struggle of picking myself back up by my own bootstraps when CLUNK! I got clipped! (This time not by the mean girl’s boxing-gloved-mittened-little-fist! But by the back-swing of the now re-occupied swing seat— with her already back in the saddle and already pumping it all giddy-up-go!)

OK. Did I say “confounding”? I mean, how was it that I’d just gotten pretty much coldcocked by some little girl? A girl not a whit taller than me, even?! And why was I the one groveling in the gravel, trying to crawl away so as not to get clipped again?! I mean… It. Made. NO. SENSE!

But worst of all, why was it me crying my eyes out like some stupid little girl? This wasn’t fair!

But boy oh boy oh boy, as if all that weren’t bad enough… in the process of getting myself back up onto my feet I just happened to eyeball the front of my parka! And Oh Jeezum Crow!

BLOOD!

My parka was soaked in BLOOD!

I’d never seen so much blood in my life!

I was bleeding to death!

I screamed a shameful, shrieky little girl-scream at the top of my lungs! And then, in a total panic, I found myself suddenly running! No, not to run back inside to find the school nurse! And no, not to any of those old-bag, fuddy-duddy teachers who smelled bad and only saw boys as unnecessary little nuisances either! No, there was only one person you wanna see when you’re bleeding to death!

I was running straight home to Ma, six houses down the sidewalk from the school, and bleating like a little lamb all the way! Ma! Ma!

I came bursting into the kitchen where Ma was washing dishes in the sink! And when she saw poor-little-bloodbath me, she must’ve thought I’d been shot! She screamed! Which made me scream all the more…

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Soon, I was seated at the kitchen table, somewhat calmed down yet sniveling. My face was washed clean and my parka, soaking in the washing machine.

It was time for the Big Debriefing.

“What happened, Tommy?”

(long silence…)

“Tommy?

Of course… there was the truth, wasn’t there. I mean I could always have simply owned up and told the ugly truth, which was still lingering right there on the tip of my tongue like a very hard pill to swallow. But sure. The truth. It’s be a sin to tell a lie. But what would the truth sound like when spoken aloud?

Uhmmm… Some sweet little girly-girl punched me ass-over-teakettle off a swing! I’m talkin’ just one, single, Joe-Palooka-punch, OK?.Nailed me square right in the nose, and I mean HARD, just like that rake I stepped on last summer? Remember that? OK? But yeah. I, a boy, let myself get bullied by some little girl.

(long silence…)

(Well, it’s not like I hadn’t sinned before.)

“Alright.”

(long silence…)

“OK. It was a snowball.”

“What? Just a snowball? I mean… this much blood, Tommy?”

“Well, actually…

(short silence…)

An ice ball, really. Yeah. An ice snowball. With… a rock in it. And nobody knows who threw it. Some bully.”

There was nothing at all shameful about being the victim of some probably-big-male bully. Right?

And well, it was just words, wasn’t it. That lie. Words. But I had already learned a thing or two about how if you string your words together right, lies can be pretty helpful. And in this case, I really wanted something helpful. Because as insignificant as this little incident may appear to you? Well, (and OK, sure. I know that what I’m about to say is, once again, going to sound like just one big, melodramatic, drama-queen exaggeration but… I’m going to say it anyway:…):

The sucker-punch that laid me out in the dirt that day had pretty much… emasculated me. All the way back in first grade.

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A Tell-all Synopsis of My ‘Love Life’ From First Grade right up to to Finding Phyllis

OK. Let’s make something perfectly clear up front: I didn’t hate girls despite my first-grade, violence-induced, post traumatic stress disorder. Quite the contrary. The mere sight of the cute girls in my class still spontaneously fluttered my heart. And I mean, Peter Pan’s Wendy would reign as the ‘pin-up-girl-ideal’ tacked to the fanciful ‘bedroom wall’ of my dreams for years. But in point of fact (and as inexplicable as all get out), even then… I was honestly even suffering from a debilitating crush on Gloria Cole! Yes, the very girl who would no doubt knock one of my teeth out next time if there were a single swings-set seat to be gained by it.

My capricious and traitorous little heart!

It’s just that she was… so cute.

Truth? Even in first grade, at an age where boys are commonly known for finding girls stupid and unlikable nuisances, down deep inside I was secretly drawn to them. I guess I was precocious in that respect. A renegade. And there were girls in my class so cute, I couldn’t take my eyes off them. There was just that magic something about their sweet little faces that mysteriously stirred my heart.

On the opposite side of the coin though, I was darkly disheartened by the belief that no girl would ever feel the same way about me. Because I was just a toad, and I knew it.

Consequently and by default in second grade, I had to be satisfied with falling in love with Becky Thatcher. And if that name has a familiar ring to it for you, it’s because she was the girl Tom Sawyer was kind of sweet on in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Yeah, correct. I’d developed a crush on a fictional character. Our second grade teacher was reading Tom Sawyer aloud to us, one chapter per day. Our family had a copy of it at home, so I brought it to school so I could follow along. And that was magic.

Now, according to an illustration of her in my copy, Becky Thatcher wasn’t all that cute but, hey— if she was good enough for Tom Sawyer, she was good enough for me. Any imaginary girlfriend in a storm. And besides, sometimes I’d look up from following along with the story, set my eyes on one of the classroom cuties, and superimpose that girl right over the imagined, poorly-drawn Becky.

Damn it, would you look at me. See? I was already a budding little romantic by second grade.

And so by that time, I was also experimenting with a little clandestine-note-passing in class. Not that I was actually having any luck with this particular note. For me it turned out just like fishing with no bait on your hook.

But time passed, and I soldiered on. Wanting what I wanted but not having the luck of a toad in hell when it came to getting it. And me, surrounded by bewitching little cutie-pie classmates as I was? My projected, girl-wise, future was looking seriously grim from where I stood at the crossroads of third grade and the rest of my life.

However, after an eternity of uncountable, one-way crushes, I got my first “countable” girlfriend in fifth grade! Lynette Barnes! One foot taller, Lynette towered over me. But I really didn’t notice or care. Because she was one very attractive giant, and blonde. And real! NoBecky Thatcher. The whole thing would never have happened were it not for the fact that her best friend, Rachael Martin, was also the girlfriend of a friend of mine. And oddly, the two of them began pushing the two of us together. Of course, other than the terror of it all, I really didn’t have to be pushed very hard.

Looking back, I can just imagine the conversation went as they schemed and conspired over my fate:

Rachael: Jeez, Lynette. We’ve just gotta find you a boyfriend.

Lynette: OK. But who?

Rachael: Well, my boyfriend’s friends with that Tommy Lyford.

Lynette: Him? Kinda short though, isn’t he?

Rachael: Well yeah. But they mostly all are, where you’re concerned. Plus he’s been making google-eyes at all the girls in school since forever, so he’d be pretty easy to get, I’m thinking.

Lynette: Yeah. He has.I dunno though. Maybe, I guess…

Rachael: Well, he’s a good kid. And, you know… probably good enough to practice on, at least.

So anyway, her boyfriend started working on me a little, so… finally I got up the courage to send her the following, very personal and intimate note:

And WHOA! I got a bite right away! And she’d checked the ‘YES’ box on the Do-You-Like-Me?-Note! It was almost too much to take in! I was terrified.

It was a whirlwind romance.

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It wasn’t like we really dated or anything. I think we sat together in the movie theater once. But I didn’t even know yet about the old ploy of parking your arm up on the back of her seat and then pretending it accidentally falls down onto her shoulders. Besides, her shoulders were too high anyway. No, we just sat there and actually watched and enjoyed the movie.

Well, at least I did.

The only thing close to a date was when my friend and I bicycled the three miles out to Lynette’s family farm. Rachael was already there for the day. And what did we do? We played some kid games. We walked and talked. About school. About our teacher perhaps. Who knows.

And oh yes, before I forget it… Lynette and I went ‘all the way.’

By ‘all the way,’ I mean that we held hands while we walked. See, I’d never held hands with a girl before. And at that point, I could barely imagine that or, especially anything else beyond that, in my wildest dreams. Me. The toad. And a girl? Willing to hold… my hand?! What else could there possibly be?

I mean, mathematically I was on Cloud 9 and in 7^th heaven!

We never hugged. We never kissed. And when we had held hands it was only because that’s what Racheal and my friend were doing. Peer pressure. Yeah, we eleven-year-olds were oh so much more innocent back in 1957.

I never told Ma about this crush because even though it was as innocent as it actually was, I knew she’d never have approved. “You are way too young to date,” she’d say. She did learn of it later on though.

After doing the laundry one day, she brought my summer jacket over to me with a “What’s this?”

I gasped! She’d found it!

She’d found where, weeks earlier, I’d gotten into her sewing basket, borrowed a needle and thread, and had sewn “T L + L B” onto an inner flap of the jacket’s lining, where no one would ever dream of looking!

She laughed at me though when I blushed.

Later of course, I tore out the threaded secret message!

Yes. A whirlwind romance. Lasted a couple of weeks. And then, poof! It was over. Done with. Gone with the wind.

Turned out I was kind of… boring, apparently.

But for me, it was plus yardage: I had had a girlfriend! It was kinda like belonging to a new and exclusive club.

What would come next?

Find out! Stay tuned for Part II…

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