You walked into the room and entered my heart

Love is a funny thing. Every Friday when I was five, my mother drove me to my grandmother’s house. My brother and sister were in school, and my mother’s beauty parlor was near Nanny.

She dropped me off at ten o’clock and would reappear after lunch with her hair coiffed majestically and a trunk filled with groceries.

It was a fun day. Nanny, dressed in her suit, hat, and white gloves, and I drove around the corner to the deli, where the man behind the counter handed me a piece of lox on a bagel before getting down to business.

“I’d like three pounds of nova, and remember to keep your thumbs off the scale,” she said vehemently.

Returning to the house, Nanny removed her hat, reached for a linen apron from the kitchen drawer, and prepared an omelet with a salt bagel, butter, and lox. I was more in love with each bite.

As I grew, I discovered there was more to love than somebody taking the time to prepare my lunch.

In fact, by the time I turned fourteen, every time a girl walked by, I was in love.

The first time I had sex, I was in love.

The second time I had sex, I was in love.

The day the New York Nets traded for Julius Erving, I was in love.

The day Keith, the hiring manager, offered me a job, I was in love.

Confusing love with somebody performing an act that made me smile was misleading.

It wasn’t just random acts of kindness or pretty girls that caused this feeling within me. As I grew into a young man, I understood we could love people who would help us, listen to us, or work with us.

But, separating love from the people important to us and that one special love is the challenge.

I was twenty-four years old, sitting in a training class for a job I started one week earlier, nursing a hangover, and trying not to sweat too much.

Arriving Sunday night armed with my four brand new suits and official calfskin briefcase, I was planning on eating dinner and going to bed early. As they say, “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”

To be clear, Robert Burns adapts from a line in “To a Mouse,” the saying: “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” (Mrs. Lesser, my eleventh-grade English teacher, had us analyze the poem before reading “Of Mice and Men,” by John Steinbeck.)

Unbeknownst to me, the trainer was waiting for me, and as we approached the check-in desk, he asked if I had ever seen the movie “Terminator.” (Did I mention the year was 1985?)

“You get SpectraVision,” he said before asking the clerk for my room number.

He turned towards the revolving door and looked back. “Great. I’ll meet you in ten minutes.”

“Terrific. The trainer is meeting me in my room in ten minutes. This can’t be good. What the heck is SpectraVision? I don’t get SpectraVision. I don’t get anything about this company.”

He arrived at my door with a six-pack of Budweiser under each arm and explained he was a film major in college who could show me details I would never otherwise notice in any movie. “I’m great with Hitchcock films.”

We finished the beer as the final credits rolled, and it felt like I had known him all my life.

Monday’s lunch included pitchers of beer followed by afternoon training and Happy Hour at the hotel bar, which somehow morphed from beers on draft to vodka on ice.

Sitting in Tuesday’s training class was challenging. I watched multiple department heads walk in, explain how their teams worked with sales, and walk out.

Pow! Bam! I’m in love!

The final manager entered. My head was pounding, and the sweat was dripping. With my shaking hand, I reached for the coffee cup in front of me, and my spinning head locked in on her.

A dark green suit with matching pumps. Big auburn hair with hazel eyes shaped like almonds. No smile. No forced jokes. Total professional. She was the epitome of drop-dead gorgeous and was looking at me. Well, perhaps in my mind, she looked my way. She presented, answered two questions, and walked out. I wanted to scream, “I love you!” I’m sure that would have gone over well. “Hello, Keith. This is Scott, I’m conducting the training here in corporate. We just fired Steve for being creepy.”

I stood by my table, saying nothing. The trainer and my new drinking buddy walked by and told me to put my tongue back in my mouth.

“Don’t worry. As a Support Rep, you’ll have your chance. Just don’t come on too strong.”

He was right. My position called for daily conversations with her. Even when I had no business to discuss, I called.

Over time, we became friends. We were each others plus one at weddings.

She called me after dates to tell me how they had gone and what was wrong with each.

“He wore Top-Siders. I hate Top-Siders. He wanted to go bowling. I hate bowling. It was the first date, and he took me to see a movie. You never see a movie on the first date.”

I listened. I consoled. I prayed one day we would go out on a first date.

To be clear, we went out, but as friends. Walking around with a woman you have a maddening crush on as friends is the hardest thing one can ever do.

Oh, I tried. She’d ask if I wanted to go out, and I would always say, “Alone?”

When the girl you love is friendly with half of the New Jersey phone directory, and you are nothing more than one of the many she wants to get together with, your popularity rises to the same level as somebody battling the coronavirus.

She was my first true love. I later learned that every girl I dated was compared to her. She was a charismatic woman with a bold sense of fashion, like a queen with flowing robes and gowns, so how could I be with someone less concerned about her appearance?

But her style was only a part of it. Besides her outward beauty, she was always ready with a kind word, and criticism was not a part of her vocabulary. She would ask for nothing but always offer her support. She knew my strengths and my weaknesses. We laughed at the same jokes. I used to tease her that her favorite color was polka dots.

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like a volcano and then subsides. And when it subsides, you must decide. You must work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is.

My first true love, and I finally dated. It was ten years and fifteen hundred miles later, but it happened. Everything about it was right. Being the best friend of your lover before becoming her lover can be one of the best things you can do. We knew each other better than anyone; we understood how the other did things and had fewer negative experiences regarding how we behaved.

And that’s more than extraordinary. Most people I know broke up because they didn’t have as many things in common as they thought. Sometimes they broke up because of boredom with each other after just a few weeks since they were different people with different interests.

Not us. We knew each other. We cared about each other. One of us wanted to scream from the roof of a tall building, “She’s in love with me. She loves me.” But I fear heights, there are few tall buildings in Boca Raton, and I was most afraid of how she might correct me and tell people we mildly tolerate each other. (Why on earth would the most beautiful woman want to date me?)

You did what?

After a few months, I broke it off. It isn’t straightforward. This trumps them all in a life filled with many decisions with limited logic.

Since breaking up with my first and what looked like my only love, my life has worsened.

“Wait,” my cousin said. “You are done with her? You love her. What’s going on?” 

I thought about his question. I did what I was told, not what I wanted. I never had a chance. It was arranged. That’s what happens when one never grows up. My father loved her, or so he thought. She played my parents. My mother gave me her phone number and told me they wanted to meet her after I took her out. 

For them, she was perfect. She wanted to get married. Despite having no friends, she wanted a big wedding where her father would walk her down the aisle. She wanted children and a house. She had competed with her older sister for years. She wasn’t getting any younger, so she understood she had to move quickly with me. Her thinking was identical to my parents.

She was an abusive woman who cost me multiple jobs, took everything I owned, and, after the divorce, ignored the co-parenting agreement by keeping our teenage sons away from me.

Karma is a bitch. But is it karma if I was weak and walked away because of others? Yes!

I hurt the woman I loved. I know I loved her because I still think about her as I sit here today. I never stopped thinking about her. I sneak peeks at her Facebook page every few months, and she still looks as exquisite as she did in that green pants suit.

The best love relationship I had was with my first true love, who was my best friend. We had a lot in common, but we had fun more than anything. Besides, we also loved each other.

It makes me wonder. What is the psychology behind first love?

So, what now?

For me, I pray for two things every night:

Reconciling with my two sons and strength. Every day and night, I think about them. I also want to be strong enough to reach out to my first (and only) genuine love. I want to call her and say, like in the song, “Hello, yeah, it’s been a while.” And then, “So, Pam, how about dinner? Yes, alone. Have I got a story for you!”