Observations from the past

Funny how old pictures can stir up memories of the past.  Some good, some not so good and the rest fall in between.  And sometimes the ones you see from 40 years ago seem like only yesterday it happened.

I have bittersweet memories of the last picture from the last blog, it brings out the good and the bad in me.  For the most part, I haven't connected with any of the girls in the picture and only one remains a friend of mine from a distance, Jenny Hanson.

There's one missing from that Motley Crue of 1977, Anne Luzum.  One of Janice's best friends Anne was in that fateful American Studies class and like Janice managed to drive me insane throughout the year.  I have no idea looking back, what provoked Anne nor Janice to see something in me to chase me around the building, perhaps it was a freshman girls thing, they all seem to have crushes on the upper classmates. There was nothing special about me; I was a loner, kept to myself and if associated with anybody it was the outcasts of Marion High School.  I loved record collecting, beer can collecting and playing records, I was not into dating anybody although if I liked somebody enough I'd walk them home from school. That meant something to me.  Anne was attractive, but one of those snooty kind of girls that you would later see hanging at around the country club, she did get a job at a bank soon after high school.  But I certainly wasn't attracted to her at all.

Martha Balster I liked a lot, Sue Barker was more reserved, which leaves us with Sue Raue Boyd.  She was the big mouth but she was a liberal thinking kind of girl.  But out of all of the girls in the pic, she was the one I asked out to the homecoming thing, which she turned me down.  She said go ask Janice.  I never did, don't ask why.

Out of all the girls of that class, it was Janice that was the one, the quintessential it girl, the most madding that I ever come across in this lifetime.  Perhaps the most compatible out of them all, the one that had a super crush on me through that time but at same time we never ever got on the same page about even dating or asking out.  What was it about her to this day continues to haunt me when I think too much about it.  She may have been the most nerdy of this girl group, she was thin as a stick, she was a honor student, she had that Farah Fawcett do that all the girls seemed to have,  she was a cheerleader, what processed her into thinking about being a part of my life?

It is pointless to ask her today and my thinking is that when she left town, she erased every memory of this and started a new life in Texas.  And she really has done well.  I can only go on heresay and what I think about the situation.  And I do believe that she did liked me a lot to really want to be my steady in high school.  I have a memory of her in class sitting on my lap.  I don't know how that happened she mentioned she wanted to, I dared her, she did that it was history too bad somebody didn't have a smartphone to put on You Tube.  She sat across the aisle from me in American Studies, Ann was behind me,  and I basically had to get it both ways from these girls.

The question remains why I never bothered to take up after Janice right off the bat, simply of the fact I was more committed to Jeanette, a summertime girl friend from Michigan to which I would never see after the summer of 1976, I thought she was the one.  And we all knew how that turned out.  Looking back upon this, had I known that Jeanette would never be back in my life, this life would be a much different story.

Janice had the most beautiful and most intimating eyes that I have ever seen. She had a good smile. And I admired her from afar, even though I kept telling her I already had a steady, she didn't quite believe me on that.  That made her try a bit harder, with help from her friends of course (namely Anne and Sue Boyd) and the more they tried, the more they annoyed me.
But I also thought that they did care about me, maybe even they love me in their own way, after all somebody gave me a valentine from them with their phone numbers.  The biggest regret that will haunt me till the day I die is the not asking Janice out when we were alone in each other presence.  Somehow I couldn't do that, it's really easy just go up and ask if they want to do something, hang at the record store, go to a drive in, get a grease bomb burger from Ole's Ham And Egger, or sit in the park and watch trains go by.

Or hell, walk Janice home from school and talk.  Isn't that how it's supposed to be?

But anyway as time went on, it seemed evident that Jeanette forgot all about me and perhaps maybe I should take up Miss Berns and see what would happened.  There was this dance in late spring I believe and everybody was there saying Janice wants to dance with you, my future guitar playing conserative buddy doug mentioned that, thought he was full of shit.  Sue came around, said the same thing, so I figured, well, I guess I'm up to it.  And the so the beginnings of Colour My World by Chicago started up, and I looked her with head looking straight down, embarrassed as heck and reach out and snatched at Janice's hand and then.

I didn't do it right I guess, she snatched her hand back.  That wasn't supposed to happen, pissed me off I told her where to go at the next turnoff and proceeded to head for the exits but somehow, it's a blur to me, I ended up slow dancing with Sue Boyd instead.  After that I walked home disgusted as hell.  The next day I was at the swingset over in Longfellow and somehow Janice and Sue were walking by (don't know why Longfellow is a bit out of her way) and we proceeded to yell at each other bout that little episode the night before.  Somehow in the exchange that she did mentioned that she did love me.  But somehow we managed to call a truce and keep in touch throughout summer.   And somehow Janice (along with Sue) and I did ride a tilt a whirl machines when Marion had a uptown summer fair days in 1977 but looking back I didn't do a very good job in keeping in touch or taking it further.  The Homecoming 77 affair came up, I think she wanted me to ask her out, I ended up getting cold feet and asking Sue Boyd out, you know the story but throughout my junior year I couldn't escape Janice's angry looks when I walked down the hall.  Perhaps it was poetic justice for her when we got jobs at Applegate's Landing when she became a cook and I ended up being a fucking dishwasher.   I guess I didn't do her any favors anyway and it's divine intervention that gave her the upper hand job wise.  But looking back, I didn't ask anybody out outside of Sue, if I did they all said no.  Only my best friend's sister bothered to ask me out in my time in High school.  I really really was a loner.

As far as I knew, if Janice dated anybody in high school when I was there, I was not aware of it or really cared that much.  But I do recall one day driving in the neighborhood in 1980 after graduation and playing Bill Amesbury's Lucky Day and she was arm and arm with somebody.  And she had that "this could have been you" look.  I felt liberated for about 5 seconds, then had the worst feeling I ever experienced.   But with that, the spell was broken, I did see her a couple times in the 80s, she dated one of my brother's best friends for a time and then took off for Texas with a classmate. And then life happens.  I do find it interesting that she doesn't have any of her classmates as facebook friends.  Maybe the memories of high school for her was a time to forget.  Pick of the wrong boy will do that too.

But my final thoughts to this, since I know that Janice and I will never cross paths again, and maybe leaving her with a bitter taste of indifference may have her blacked that out forevermore.  But being a young and confused brat, and choosing the wrong one back then didn't help me either.  I had to deal with fucking bullies most of my time there, and if I wasn't fighting somebody in the alley, I was fighting somebody in the hallway.  Except for the dumbfuck that i should have stabbed right in the heart when the time was right.  High school was the low point of my life, poor grades, fighting and dealing with freshmen girls and upper classmen, it's a surprise I didn't hang myself at that time.  The regret: I didn't tell nobody about my plight and the bullies who continued to fuck me over or spit in the damn seat like a fucking five year old would. I basically kept it all in, and kept my feelings to myself, even to ones who would have liked to know what was going on with me.  Thank God and our lucky stars, we didn't have social media and the internet and cellphones back then.  That would have been holy hell for me. And also thank our lucky stars we didn't have shitty top forty or rap dominating the air waves.

That said,  Janice (and the rest of that gang) will always have a place in my heart.  Yes, I loved Janice as much as she loved me but like her we could never get on the same page or at the same time.  To which I say I'm sorry that I didn't treat her better when she was a part of my life.  But then again 15 year old boys don't make very good boyfriends anyway,  not that 53 year old guys are much better.  I am not sure that Janice would enjoy having a 53 year old drummer music hoarder around the house bitching about traffic and crappy radio stations, but even back then, I never doubted her for a second that she would have been a good woman to be with.  But she found her soulmate in 1986 and she got what she wanted out of her life.  She got herself a very good man.  And we'll never see each other again.  It's been over 30 years since I last seen her.

If we could live our lives all over again (and I really really don't want to) it would be nice to correct past mistakes and not being the self imposed loner that I was back then.  It didn't pay off then and it sure doesn't now.  But I do wish that I could have taken Janice to Homecoming or even if we made it that far to the prom.  I also wished that she would have taken that first step too and did the slow dance on Colour My World with me instead of Sue doing damage control.   That would have been the steps toward a new beginning.

But that's history.  Life goes on. She'll never know it, but I was glad that she got me through American Studies and made my Sophomore year one to remember. As well as Sue, the other Sue, Martha and Jenny.  And Anne, whereever she may be.   I wish you well.

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