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I guess there’s nothing like a cloudy, rainy morning to start reminiscing. Pandora Radio was playing on my computer when I heard the first notes of Floyd Cramer playing “Last Date.” And then my mind was really off into the ether somewhere.
Perhaps there is no more intense emotion in our youth than heartbreak. We really never get over it. Sure, we’ve moved on. The person who meant so much to us back then is someone we can’t even picture today. What did she look like and what the hell was it about her that I liked so much? But as with long ago surgeries, the scars still remain. All that’s needed to recall the anguish is hardly anything at all, maybe only a few notes from Cramer’s piano, and then it all comes rushing back.
Admit it. You can all recall every moment of each romance (and I use the word in its most general sense since most of what we called romance when we were young was just some indefinable longing). We might be at an age where we have trouble sometimes remembering a loved one’s birthday, but the heartbreak hangs around for a lifetime, and who knows, maybe even after we’ve left this godforsaken planet. Cramer still will be playing that riff from “Last Date” that must’ve been born on a rainy day like this one.
The earliest memories might even go back to kindergarten if you were lucky like me to have a classmate like the girl with the dark eyes and ringlets for hair. Maybe for you it happened later on in school (it always starts in school, you know) with a lithesome girl with pale blue eyes and the slightest scar beneath her right eye, an imperfection that somehow made her seem even more beautiful. You never got more than a polite smile from her. Maybe she didn’t go for chubby-faced boys with messed up hair and protruding teeth that threatened to leave your mouth and go off and hide somewhere. Play that note one more time, Mr. Cramer.
Who knew that was just the beginning of teen angst that often overlaps into the 20s without you quite realizing it. Trying to cover up the worst zits, to learn how to kiss a girl or to dance in front of a mirror and decide dancing probably wasn’t going to be your strong suit — it was all part of the pain of growing up.
I remember a touch football game between guys and girls during college on a summer night. It was so innocent it could’ve been a scene out of one of those beach movies with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. In my mind, it became some romantic short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The girl was just some apple-cheeked kid with short hair and bangs who laughed a lot, but in my mind she was another depiction by Fitzgerald of his doomed wife, Zelda. In the background, a tinkling piano played “All Alone.”
When you experienced the heartbreak of the end of an actual relationship — and not some fantasy spinning in your head — you realized all the other depressing stuff was just practice. Yes, practice, Allen Iverson.It was all just practice we had been talking about. You started associating songs with those sad moments. Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” hit you in the pit of your stomach at the wrong time in a Wildwood bar after a breakup, but luckily you were with friends who laughed at you and forced you to laugh in return. It had all ended in some bad pub about a month before, to the soundtrack of Acker Bilk playing “Stranger on the Shore.” I still can’t listen to that one. Hardly remember the girl, but “Stranger on the Shore” never became a bizarre instrumental pop song from England for me that somehow made the charts. The song still makes me feel like a stranger on the shore.
It suddenly dawned on me how we only remember our own heartbreak. In our minds, we were always the victim at the end of some sad summer love. They were always the cruel ones, inventing excuses for not wanting to date us again. We were always the humble knights of the lost lovers’ roundtable, devoted and yet scorned. Where were the memories of our own cruelty? Why wasn’t there a vivid memory of a night in San Antonio, Texas when we were the big shots in Air Force khakis, reservists playing at being wartime heroes, and they had brought in some young ladies from Southwest State Teachers’ College, the same place where Lyndon Baines Johnson had once taught?
There was dinner at the Old Heidelburg, dancing afterward, and who knew what in the promise of that dark, warm night. You didn’t like your date. She was a late replacement, a plain-faced quiet girl. You thought you deserved Kim Novak, so you pointedly ignored her for most of the night. When you decided you’d do her a favor and ask her to dance, she said softly, “I don’t care to.” In retrospect, she didn’t miss much.
It seems like 100 years ago, and maybe it was Floyd Cramer finishing “Last Date,” but there in your room, on a rainy morning, you wished you could apologize to that girl — apologize for possibly being one of the scars left on her heart.
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
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