Chapter 27: Walking Into the Light

THE CLOSE CONTACT WITH RILEY sent me back to my own adolescence and I had painful dreams.

There is something I believe only happens once in your life. This blanket statement is based on the exhaustive research of my fifty-seven years. For me it happened the fall of my sophomore year in high school. Rhonda and I were high school sweethearts and dated (on and off) for three years. We’d started talking to each other in the hall at school because I’d lost an assignment and asked her if she had it. But we kept talking. And talking. We met for lunch and talked. We met at football games and sat together. And talked.

At homecoming that fall, I asked her to go to the dance with me. We were both just old enough to date at school events and nothing more. We talked until the music got so loud we couldn’t hear anymore, and then we got up and danced until we were sweaty and exhausted.

The dance ended and I walked Rhonda home. It was after 11:00 and we had midnight curfews, so we weren’t talking much as we walked through the Ballard neighborhood where we lived.

Then it happened.

The backs of our hands touched as we walked along. Once. Twice. The third time they seemed to stick together and we walked with just the backs of our hands touching for nearly two blocks.

And we didn’t say a word.

I’m not even sure I breathed in that whole time.

A sixteen-year-old boy can transfer every nerve ending in his body to a single square inch of skin that is touching a girl for the first time. Not that we’d never touched each other before. But for those two blocks, there was no other reason to be touching each other than that we wanted to.

And it completely took my breath away.

For forty years after that night, every time I thought of it everything around me stood still and I lived in that square inch of contact. It is the single moment in a lifetime that you realize that someone outside your own skin can become so important that the rest of the world disappears. And that first realization happens only once.

There is never a second first time.

Two weeks later we went into the football stadium and took seats next to our friends Randy and Kay. Kay and Rhonda sat between Randy and me which was okay because both of us guys were more interested in the girls than in each other. As we got settled, I reached over and Rhonda took my hand in hers. We sat there holding hands.

“That was fast!” Kay said. I looked at her with complete lack of comprehension until I saw the disappointed look on Randy’s face as he held his hand palm up on his knee, being ignored by Kay. To us, it was where our hands belonged. On the other hand, Randy and Kay married right out of high school, had three kids, and lived happily ever after.

That first experience isn’t necessarily an omen of the future.

I was a good student in math and science. Rhonda was an artist. She was, in fact, a very good artist and it was her skill at design and art that kept her active in everything from decorating for the prom to editing the school newspaper. I loved to look at what she painted, even though I couldn’t tell her that the colors she described to me as she painted were no more real to me than the numbers in the national debt. There were a lot more of them than I would ever see.

In the fall of our senior year, we went with friends up to Whidbey Island and climbed to the top of Goose Rock. Rhonda wanted to look at the sunset so she could paint it someday, and we managed in the process to get separated from our friends. It turned out that we liked it up there, and the sun was moving westward over the Straits of Juan de Fuca. We sat up there watching the sunset, holding hands on the rock. I couldn’t remember ever watching a sunset like that. There are pretty ones in Seattle, but looking out to sea and seeing the sun sink into it was a breath-taking experience.

I didn’t know what I’d missed until about nine months later.

It was the week before high school graduation and for all practical purposes seniors had cut out of school. We were meeting for parties and making general fools of ourselves. I wasn’t too surprised when Rhonda invited me over to her house one afternoon. In fact, I had hopes that this might be a sign that we were going to consummate our relationship. We’d had some rocky patches during the year, but everything was great now as far as I could tell.

The surprise she gave me wasn’t sex.