HE saved ME

HE saved ME

As a young girl, I fell madly in love, because that’s what most young girls do. Deeply, irrevocably, pathetically, in love. With a football player, at college, no less, because that’s what wild uncontrollable young girls do. Especially girls who are raised in very prohibitive, punishing homes, with a parent who is extremely strict and constricting.

Eighteen years old, away at university, completely free from parental prison for the first time in my nascent life, and head over heels besotted with Big Man on Campus football fella, Brad. Yes. One of those. I was one of those girls, who rushed after ball players while others rushed sororities. I don’t know why. Maybe those men accepted me easier than the ladies did. Curvy and cute, I satisfied a craving that young jocks effortlessly spot across cafeteria crowds.

We “jock flies”, as we were called back then, were deemed “easy”, and held horrid reputations within our peer groups, but posited pure envy as the reason for sister treason.

Being a ball player’s “girl” meant all sorts of special accommodations were granted, including field access at football games, broken dormitory rules forgiven, unattended classes not recorded as such, and lots of free stuff. Teenage college kids like free stuff, just so you know.

Anyway, oblivious to gossip or rules or class schedules as posted, along with Bobby Bowden as the head coach – yep! That Bobby Bowden! – Brad and I carried on our amorous little liaison until we established as “true love,” and then most naysayers let us alone. We were a couple. We would always be a couple. This was real.

Oh sure. As real as a thought bubble, which would say, “Are you kidding me?”

You came to college … you crushed on a football player … who had no interest in football to begin with, but used it to get a scholarship … you had your little affair … and then he will go back to his little hometown … and marry his high-school sweetheart.

Exactly. That is exactly what Bradley did, except first he got his high-school sweetheart pregnant, because then they had to get married. (Because back in the age of dial phones, slide rulers, and propeller airplanes, that’s what people did. If you got pregnant, you married immediately to hide the obvious deviation from biblical directives.)

We had had our fun. Brad was done. I was devastated.

I stayed distraught for a long time. I felt duped. I believed despite Brad being a football player, which instantly established him as a “player”, which translated to trustworthiness not included, did not, in fact, account for the exceptional exception of ME – the perfect paragon of smart, precious, fun, and therefore, permanent.

Apparently, I miscalculated. Especially the permanent part.

Of course I was never going to find another love like Brad. I could never adore another man in that same vein. I moved on, had other boyfriends, but Brad was the one that held my heart, and for many years, I carried the torch that scorched only me.

Brad became a physician. He desperately wanted to be a veterinarian, but the demanding schooling required daunted him, so he pursued podiatry.

While Brad was in residency, I ran into him in a podiatric hospital, surprising us both – well, him, much more than me, let’s just say. “Coincidences” are part of my mainstay in life, so much so that I don’t even believe in “coincidence” for the most part. I was there to apply for a job, Brad happened to stroll through the lobby at precisely that slim point in time, no … that cannot be called “coincidence.”

Anyway, we agreed to have dinner at my apartment that evening, and Brad showed up with steaks, green beans, and Pepperidge Farm lemon layer cake, which to this day when I see that cake in frozen food aisles everywhere, still reminds me of that night.

Dinner was delicious, but we were uncomfortable. Brad, married with a child … me, wondering what happened to “us”, and why … still swooning with a wound I didn’t know would fester so strongly so many years after the silly affair. Because it was silly, right? Aren’t most college romances silly little experiments of adult life? Happenstance?

Brad left my apartment rapidly after dinner. Discomfort engulfed us during digestion. We barely had conversation that wasn’t stilted and awkward. He was married. He had a child and another on the way. Proper behavior isn’t scripted for these sorts of encounters. He kind of ran down those steps as I recall, away from me. Forever.

Though I never forgot him or any of the feelings, we didn’t see each other again. Decades passed, I failed at life’s tests for the most part, but managed to carve out an existence that included amazing world travel, multiple exciting careers, and several moves to several states. Oh, and other loves, all of which led to nothing. Some fun, but nothing. White picket fence dreams, little doggies (and for me, big horses, too), children, the proverbial “Leave it to Beaver” life, not to be mine.

Nearly 4 decades later, now in the age of psycho crap … people talk to dead people … computers have taken over for brains … phone trees with foreign tongues have replaced actual English-speaking drones … everything costs so much but we don’t know why … cars drive themselves, and don’t do much better than we did … and terrorists threaten to end all of this bliss instantly, if we don’t give them, wait … what exactly do they want? So, in the midst of all this madness we call our current world, I get a call….

An old friend whom I haven’t connected with since college calls to tell me about Brad.

“Have you heard?” he asks, “about Brad?”

“No.” I answer, in complete shock that this is even happening at this moment in my otherwise completely chaotic life. “What happened?”

Okay, admittedly Facebook, that dreaded spy and fantastically addicting foolish platform that has reunited me with all people from all my life (is that a good thing?), brought me back together with friends from afar, and here I was talking to Brad’s college roommate, who was always a good guy back in the day, and still. He explained that Brad had retired, given up his practice, and was now in a nursing home, with advanced senility, or Alzheimer’s, or whatever the label of the week is for people that lose mental capacity. Brad had had a very hard life, consumed by addictions of some sort, his wife had left him and then committed suicide, his whole world had fallen apart over a long period of time, and now he was losing his mind at a rapid pace.

The picture painted was bleak. Dire. Shocking and disturbing in a way I can’t say. But mostly, that silent for so long wound awoken. I didn’t even know it was still there. How could that be? I had long ago gotten over the love.

Or not.

I wailed. Internally, then externally. I guess it’s true, all the mushy poems and stories about love. It never ends. It goes dormant, it smushes down into crevices we cease to care about, but it never ever dies. Not if it is real. And when we uncover that bottom of the bottoms, there it waits … love. In a different form, perhaps, but positively, absolutely resolute in its determination to alter our purview of all loves before and after. Love. It’s a permanent poison. One we ingest over and over in the hopes that it will consume us.

Recently, I went to visit Brad. I knew what to expect.

A lockdown facility with all sorts of silly (to me) rules, but nowadays with the world the way it is, they “protect” their residents, herald HIPPA as the new king of caution, and without permission from powers that be and powers of attorney, visits are limited, supervised, and often prohibited.

Using my wordly wisdom and clever circumvents, I tracked Brad down at the local YMCA. (No, I won’t reveal how I knew he was there, or how I found him.) I found him rocking in a rocking chair. Recognized him right away, even after almost forty years. Tears took shape behind my eyes and I pushed them away, needing to be joyful and optimistic that Brad would even know who I am.

Taking a deep breath of resolute belief, I walked the few steps toward him and sat down next to him. He watched me walk toward him.

“Hi Brad.” I smiled wide and sat down.

“Do you know who I am?”

“Were you a patient of mine?” he asked. He looked at me curiously, kindness etched in his please forgive me for not remembering gaze.

“No. I am Lori.”

“Oh!” he exclaimed, and stared harder at me in instant recognition. “Oh, Lori! Yes, I remember you….”

We rocked and sat in the sun, and pieced together a stilted conversation recalling whatever Brad could remember, with me filling in certain details in an effort to help him remember more.

At some point, I bravely said, “Brad, you know, as a young girl, I was desperately in love with you.” I paused long and looked at him. “And I still love you.” He turned his head to look right at me, teared up, and reached over and grabbed me in a big bear hug. For a second, it scared me in its strength. He is still a very large man. In fact, I didn’t remember Brad being so much bigger than me. Either that, or I’ve shrunk much more than I realize.

I don’t think anyone had told him that they loved him for a very long time. Brad burst with emotion. Emotion that touched me deeply.

We made our way back to his assisted living facility, and dined together over their not so delicious nursing home fare, but delved back into the way past, because often people with cognizant losses are better able to remember the distant past than the present.

Some things about Brad remained intact. Other things struck me as superbly odd. Pieced together memories made a mental collage like a shadow box in Brad’s brain. Bits and fragments forged together that didn’t really go together. As a Picasso painting, subject to interpretation.

I played piano for him in the lobby, hoping to remind him of his college days when I played for him every night after dinner. We looked at photos, straightened up his apartment (as much as he would allow), I tuned his guitar for him, and well, what else is there to do with someone who is losing their mind and knows it?

“I have Alzheimer’s,” Brad abruptly announced at some point.

“I know,” I said. I waited for him to say more about that or how he felt about it, but he didn’t.

Eventually it was time to leave and we walked out to my car. I told him I would visit again. And I might.

No “coincidences”, right? I don’t believe in coincidence, in the sense that everyone uses the premise as a catch-all for strange occurrences in otherwise predictable lives.

I thought about Brad all the way home, and I still think of the amazing way God brings back some people into our lives to show us how He saves us. To teach us His lessons. About life. About love. About everything.

Here was a man I loved. Here was a man I desperately wanted to keep loving throughout my life and forever – to have a family with, to grow old with, until the end of my time.

But God had a different plan for me. A less painful plan. Which always felt more painful to me as I lurched loveless through life, but now … now, I know better. He knew that if I got what I wanted then, when I didn’t really know anything about what I really wanted, I would’ve ended up in the worst possible situation … maybe dead, maybe divorced, maybe devastated by a drug-addicted physician husband, certainly destroyed by early-onset Alzheimer’s, and potentially a very young widow.

Because we can’t know. We can never know what lies ahead on the route we pursue. We are mere passengers, struggling to drive. Instead, we are instructed to sit back and enjoy the journey. We don’t. We want control.

I didn’t get what I wanted. But I always got what I needed.

As I drove the long drive back home, over and through majestic mountains of beautiful scenery and glorious fall foliage I hadn’t witnessed in decades, I wept. For the beauty of it all, for all my falls from grace, for Brad and his certain slide away from all he ever knew or loved … which includes me.

Grief is complicated. It’s a constant pinch in the soft part of my gut. It hurts. It hurts in a way I don’t have words for. I have lost and lost and lost loves, over and over again, and I realized Brad was the beginning of the losses; he was the first one to break my heart; that even though I thought I had long ago left that loss, I had not. Pain is permanent. The broken-hearted kind of pain. It never leaves.

And there are no coincidences of our coming together, Brad and I, either then or later or now.

It fills me with a renewed sense of gratitude for the amazing work God did. HE saved ME.

Thanks, God.

Just Another Lori Story