I'm Still in Touch With My High School Girlfriends More Than 50 Years Later
My girlfriends taught me my first lessons in heartache and heartbreak. Now we share photos of our children and grandchildren.
Of all the events in my life I might dare to count as miracles of the highest order — my marriage, say, and the arrivals of our two children and two grandchildren — the most surprising is possibly that I've somehow managed to stay in touch with most of my long-ago girlfriends.
Thank you, Facebook.
As it happens, a 2019 study found that men tend to take a more favorable view of female ex-partners than women do of male exes. Two studies from 2017 reported several reasons why exes may stay friends, including a sense of security, civility and "unresolved romantic desires."
In ninth grade I went steady — that was the term for this puppy-love protocol — with my classmate Elisa.
My first sweetheart, in the seventh grade, was Diane. She and I participated regularly in the 1960s cultural phenomenon known as make-out parties. Couples assembled of an evening in some suburban den and, with lights dimmed and songs from a record player serenading us to set the mood, kissed each other like crazy. We even held contests to time whose lips stayed locked longest. This activity definitely qualified as fun.
In ninth grade I went steady — that was the term for this puppy-love protocol — with my classmate Elisa. Our relationship, though otherwise mutually rewarding, came with just one catch. She was already five-foot-nine to my then scrawny five-foot-three, my scalp even with her chest. She so towered over me, as fully developed as a grown woman, that our public appearances around our junior high school rendered me a laughingstock. Ours was an unsustainable union, and regrettably short-lived.
Leslie was my infatuation in high school. She was brainy, beautiful and blond. I was smitten with her longer than any other girlfriend. We philosophized about the nature of existence, the rock bands of our day and the literary merits of commas versus semi-colons. She was soft-spoken and low-key, while I was neither. None of our classmates could understand what she ever saw in me. Even so, we remain friends to this day.
Memories Shared
I was still at my most impressionable back then, and every experience then qualified as formative, stamping me forever. Girls, as if a species unto themselves, fascinated me, certainly more than school and anything else except baseball. Every day, it seemed, I felt toward one girl or another a tug of yearning that might graduate into a crush.
"You also listened intently to whatever was on my mind — and I liked that."
"First love," said George Bernard Shaw, "is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity."
"You were very funny," Leslie recalls today, "but also very serious. You were always looking below the surface. I remember you took me to Broadway to see the play 'A Long Day's Journey Into Night.' Hardly typical teenage stuff. You also listened intently to whatever was on my mind — and I liked that."
Diane, on the other hand, recently told me she has no recollection of our ever making out at any parties. Disappointing news for me, given the implicit suggestion that my kissing was somehow less than memorable.
My girlfriends, more than my mother, grandmothers and aunts, introduced me to – and taught me to appreciate – the mysterious charms of the feminine. Holding hands ranked as a big deal. Draping your arm around a girl's shoulders was even better.
Young Love and Mature Love
My girlfriends tolerated the immaturity I took decades to outgrow. They taught me my first lessons in heartache and heartbreak. Ultimately, they prepared me, in what amounted to an apprenticeship, for my destiny, namely one Elvira Chirichella, now my wife of 45 years.
"Young love is a flame: very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering," clergyman Henry Ward Beecher declared in the 19 century. "The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep-burning, unquenchable."
Diane went on to be a speech and language pathologist for school-age children in St. Louis for 33 years, Elisa a country-club executive in Miami and Leslie an advertising copywriter and travel photographer in Westchester. Diane has two children and a granddaughter, Elisa two children and a grandchild, and Leslie has two sons, one recently married.
We still congratulate each other on birthdays, anniversaries and other milestone celebrations. We exchange compliments as we admire photos of children getting married and grandchildren newly born.
I've never forgotten these girlfriends and I never will.
But maintaining contact with exes across half a century sometimes goes awry. So I learned in reconnecting with Brina, a high school girlfriend three years my junior. She had a sweet smile with a personality that matched. As a bonus, her father owned a local fried-chicken franchise that readily afforded us freebies (she once told me she suspected other boyfriends of dating her mainly to feast at will).
My delight at rediscovering her after so long turned into dismay. What a cad! Talk about conduct unbecoming!
"We always had fun times together," Brina recently told me. "You took me to see Richie Havens at the Fillmore East on October 11, 1969."
But Brina also reminded me of a detail about our time as a couple that I had somehow conveniently forgotten. It was I who had broken up with her. And not just once but twice. "I was very sad about it," she told me.
My delight at rediscovering her after so long turned into dismay. What a cad! Talk about conduct unbecoming!
Ashamed of my actions, I apologized. "I never meant to hurt you," I said. "I'm sorrier than you'll ever know.
Luckily, she forgave me — and, though still unredeemed, I was reprieved.
"It's all okay," she assured me. "No worries. Really. I moved on."
It's true: clearly Brina recovered from me without skipping a beat. She's still married to her first husband. She was a teacher in preschool and elementary schools in Fort Lauderdale for 45 years before retiring. Today she plays regularly with all seven of her grandchildren.
