Just having it keeps that little dream alive and provides me, whenever I think about it, with a sense of quiet satisfaction.
I have Bob Dylan’s phone number, and because I do, my little world shines brighter.
25 March 2007
THE GIRL IN THE
GREEN DRESS
I went to an all boys’ school. I was painfully shy and selfconscious, especially around girls. So I never had a girlfriend. Not even close. When everyone else was falling in love and kissing each other, I wasn’t kissing anyone.
In grade ten there was a school dance. It was held on a Friday evening in October. I was, maybe, fifteen years old. I wanted to go to the dance. I bought a ticket. And then I came face to face with the next step. I needed a date. When you go to an all boys’ school, you can’t show up at a dance without a date. If everyone did that, there would be no one to dance with. Only a loser would go alone. Probably no one ever had gone alone in the history of the school. I wasn’t about to be the first.
I had to find a girl to go with. And I didn’t have a hope of doing that.
I could have asked my friend Marilyn. She was sort of the girl next door—a pal who had a cottage up at the lake. But I didn’t ask her. I don’t mean disrespect, but I didn’t want to go with a pal. I wanted romance. Instead of doing something about that, I waited for something to happen. Of course, nothing did.
Maybe in some spoony moment I phoned a girl, intending to ask her to come with me. I seem to remember doing that, but probably her mother answered and I hung up. I used to do that from time to time, mostly from phone booths so no one in my family could be party to my ineptitude. Or, perhaps, my desire. Phoning a girl was the scariest thing in the world. Rejection, the likely outcome, seemed so certain and so horrible that just dialing the numbers took hours of preparation.
So on the Friday night of the dance when my dad told me he would drive me, and I said that would be okay, I had to come up with a story that would explain my missing date. I told him I had arranged to meet her at the dance.
He dropped me at the front door of my school. I hung around outside, waiting for him to leave. When he was out of sight, I took off. I had a plan.
There was that same night a teen dance at a nearby community centre that I had read about in a local paper. My plan was to go to that dance, find a girl there and ask her to come to the school dance with me.
I was desperate. I couldn’t go alone.
I got to the community centre and scoped the room. All of the girls were wearing jeans. That was a deal breaker. I couldn’t take a girl in jeans to my school dance. It was a semiformal. There was one girl wearing a dress, however. I waited for a slow song and asked the girl in the dress to dance with me. She agreed. While we danced I told her about the dance at my school. Want to go with me? I asked. As I write this I am thinking it could sound kind of cool. I go to one dance, pick up a girl and take her to another. I want you to understand that I was frantic. Cool was nowhere on the radar.
Surprisingly, the girl agreed. I remember her dress, the one that made me choose her. It was green. But that’s all I remember. I certainly don’t remember her name. But if this sounds vaguely familiar, if you are the girl in the green dress, I would love to talk to you again. I would love to say thanks.
But that is not why I still think of that night. What I think about is this: as we walked from that community dance to the dance at my school, I made the girl in the green dress promise she wouldn’t tell anyone at the dance where we had met.
“I’m going to tell everyone that I know you from my cottage,” I said.
I can’t remember how I explained this to her. I’m sure I didn’t tell her the truth. The truth was I didn’t want anyone to know I was a desperate loser who had to find his date at a local community centre at the last minute.
So we went to my school dance, and the only other thing I remember from the rest of that night is that I walked the girl in the green dress home. I had never kissed a girl before, and I remember as we came upon her house, I began to wonder if this was going to be the night I was finally going to get kissed. It wasn’t.
And here is why I am telling you all this. Here is what I want to know. Why all those lies? If I had told my buddy Mike that I didn’t have a date the week before the dance, I know he would have fixed me up. He might even have offered anyway. I seem to have a vague memory of that happening. But I didn’t let him.
And why didn’t I tell my dad? What a great father-and-son talk that could have been. Hey, Dad, can I tell you something?
And while I was walking that girl in the green dress home, why didn’t I tell her I had never kissed a girl before, and that I really wanted to kiss her goodnight. Why didn’t I tell her I was nervous, and would do it if I knew how, but I didn’t know how. Why didn’t I tell her I was afraid? How adorable would that have been? Who could have resisted that? The simple truth would have got me my heart’s desire.
I have wondered about that over the years. It has taken me an awful long time to learn that simple lesson. I am getting better at it these days. Speaking from my heart and saying what I really and deeply feel. I try to do it especially when I am feeling afraid and vulnerable because I have learned that the only thing that ever really serves you is the truth, especially when it’s hard and difficult.
I try to remember that if I had spoken my heart, that girl in the green dress probably would have kissed me that October night, the wind blowing the leaves, the moonlight suddenly so much softer.
1 October 2008
THE DESK LAMP
I bought a lamp at a craft show. It is a small table lamp, less than a foot high. It has an antique brass stand and a shade made of milky glass. It is too low to the ground, or, to be more precise, to the desk where I work, to shed any light and too reticent about the light-shedding business in any case—it tends to “glow” rather than illuminate, the light too soft to be of any help other than to the mood.
Yet in the mood-setting business, my little lamp is a prince among lamps. A day doesn’t pass without it brightening my mood.
I turn it on every morning when I sit down to set about my work (which given the abundance of light in my office in the morning is akin to lighting a campfire on a summer afternoon). And maybe it’s this essentially unessential quality, above its graceful milky-ness and its warm yellowness, that makes my little lamp so appealing.
As I sit at my desk, day in and day out, answering my phone, paying my bills and scribbling away in between, I know that my lamp and I share this fundamental fact: neither of us is really necessary in this big wide world of light. But bidden, or unbidden, we are here nevertheless. Here by the grace of some big unknown thing. And while we are here, we will shine when we are called to, and do our best to shine as brightly as we can, shining away until the dark morning when someone will forget to turn us on.
6 February 2005
The Vinyl Café Notebooks Page 24
