I know; we’re supposed to finish last as the saying goes.
Travelling as much as we did (eight high schools in 4 years) served both to uproot our lives, severing close relationships, interrupting school years, as it did to allow me to learn a very valuable skill set: the ability to negotiate.
And win.
Another life lesson was the adjustments I was forced to make with girlfriends. This bouncing to and from different girls led me to a fuck-up of the highest order and to this day, I blush in embarrassment when I think about it.
In my junior year of high school, I spent half the year in a small rural South Carolina town where I lived out my own version of the sports movie classic Remember the Titans starring Denzel Washington
I had a wonderful girl in my home state of California that I managed to entertain and hold on to for my entire senior year of high school. She was a gorgeous blonde bombshell who lived in Ojai, California. Her name was Sheila.
I am a risk-taker, as you know, so I will venture the political correctness by saying she was red-hot and she looked like she wanted you to have repeated sex with her ‘til dawn’s early light, so to speak.
On Winter Break, I headed out to spend some holiday time with my mother and stepfather in western Massachusetts. I was introduced to this drop-dead gorgeous brunette who was a senior in high school and was headed to Yale next year.
Brynn had a body that did not elicit double-takes.
No.
You looked at the porcelain white skin and the soft brown eyes and your eyes didn’t move. They stayed fixed to her mesmerizing body.
She shared that same look.
We bonded. (now THAT was a politically-correct word) and I promised to write her when I returned to school in fall.
I made the same promise to my girlfriend in California.
Two girls.
Two different coasts.
Separated by an entire country for heaven’s sakes, what could possibly go wrong?
I had a girlfriend at school in my freshman year, because this was the last year the school would be an all-male institution; in the following year, women would be allowed to matriculate.
I was thinking of sunny California and the bounteous trout streams in Matilija Canyon, close to Ojai. I smiled when I recounted the times we jumped in the cold, clear waters naked and ended up on the flat rocks where we touched each other’s souls. I wrote down every steamy detail.
I told Sheila I didn’t do anything except study over the break (I had gone to Massachusetts and met Brynn) and I could not wait to get back to her hot ass and all the crazy sex when May and the end-of-semester came along.
I sent off the letters with a big shit-eating grin thinking, that’s right I am going to see my girlfriend after sending letters to TWO other beautiful girls.
I really thought I was something.
That is until the following week when I got a letter from Brynn in Massachusetts. It was a fully-stuffed envelope and it contained familiar writing.
It should look familiar; it was my handwritten letter…
To Sheila.
Stay well.
