It has been 43 years since I graduated high school. The days of madras shirts, Ford Mustangs, Johnny Mathis, spirit committee and smoking cigarettes with ignorant abandon are way behind me. I do not long for that time. A time of innocence, yes, but unbridled happiness, no. I have no nostalgia.
Today, I sit in a small community theatre in a small town in Pennsylvania watching my high school boyfriend, Richard Freedman, in the role of Morrie Schwartz, dying of ALS in the renowned play, Tuesdays with Morrie. I have not seen Richard for years and never in a theatre production. He has been starring in community theatre for a long time in between building a successful career as a dentist.
He is really good in the part. I mean great. Broadway material. He has captured the complexity of the role, the pain, the richness of it. Who would have guessed that he had the depth of character to have played it? I knew him as a goofy, basketball loving, surfacy kind of guy, sweet and kind, and of course, of prime importance to a 17 year old, great to look at.
At graduation, Richard went off to Pitt, I to G.W. He told me once he was in love then, that I broke his heart. He wanted to settle down. He had plans. He would become a dentist and practice with his brother. He would coach high school basketball too. Have kids. It was his dream. It’s what he wanted.
I never knew what I wanted. I knew what I didn’t want and that included settling down, whatever that meant, and certainly not in a small town in Pennsylvania. Instead, I noncommittally hurled myself from one place to another, drawn to those on the fringe, the unconventional, the foreign. I went after whatever it was I was looking for with great passion and some recklessness.
Some of us married, became lawyers, made a lot of money, bought shore houses. Others moved, divorced, turned gay, struggled with a life in the arts or illness or addiction. We were there at Bernard’s heart transplant in Houston, and Armstrong’s steps on the moon, at Woodstock, and at Roe vs. Wade. We watched Kent State, Watergate and Jim Jones. We swallowed the pill. We spoke for women’s rights, Rwanda, and the end of Vietnam all to the cacophony of Mark Chapman’s shot, 9/11, the internet, the Exxon Valdez, Columbine, Kevorkian and Katrina. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge.
Forty years later. I’ve found what I was looking for. Clearly Richard has too. We are both of us, a little world weary from our separate “accidental journeys,” as Morrie so aptly puts it. Wiser too. Richard doesn’t practice dentistry with his brother anymore. It seems there were too many irreconcilable differences throughout their forty year partnership. Turns out, sometimes blood is not thicker than water. I’m settled in the suburbs trying to put a kid through college, scraping by on a writer’s income. To the question I have often asked myself, “How would it be if I’d married him those many years ago,” Would I have found my way? I can only imagine with just a fleeting regret, the beautiful teeth, I’d have today!
Sixties Chick 