Happy Valentine's Day



My first date was a Valentine's Day tolo.  Does anyone use that phrase anymore?  Anyway, it's a dance that the girl does the inviting.  I was tall, over 5' 8", skinny, weighed about 105.  At the ripe old age of 12 I looked about 10.  In March I would turn 13.  We had just moved again, from Sunnyside, Oregon, into SE Portland.  My hair was very long and my Mom used those headband thingys to keep it back off my face; I was inept (still am) at doing any hair stuff.  Because of that the other kids called me "Alice" as in Alice in Wonderland.  Or maybe I was off in Wonderland, who knows?  Funny enough Alice is an anagram for Celia, but I digress.

Roy shared home room with me, an art class with a fabulous teacher.  Both of us wanted  to be famous illustrators when we grew up.  Magazine illustration was very big in the 50's. Roy was 13, tall, skinny, and blond like me.  I think people would have had no trouble thinking we were related.  I loved to dance, practiced in my room alone every night, still had the rudiments from dance lessons in grade school.  I was just dying to go to a dance, our school held them every week.  It was clear by February the possibility of anyone asking me to a dance was teeny to remote.  I sat by Roy every day in the back of the room and it was easy to ask him what he thought about dances.  He looked at me and said, "Oh I can dance, I just don't think anyone would go with me." I told him I would, and just asked him straight out to go with me and he said "Yes."

It turned out Roy, like me, only lived a couple of blocks from school.  Almost the same couple of blocks.  So all the parental units decided we could walk to the dance on our own.  Except for a frothy white strapless formal left over from an overdone grade school graduation the previous June, I only owned one dress, a green cotton jumper with little tiny flowers on it. I wore the little white bolero sweater that covered up my bony little chest when I was wearing the formal.  Mom did my hair with a green ribbon, Alice style again.  Roy came to "pick me up" that Saturday night and off we strolled.  I had a wonderful time, and I think Roy did too, as he asked me to the next one and we kept going for the duration of the school year.  Alas for me, the family fortunes required a move to Seattle at the end of school: Dad went to work for the state of WA working on salmon research at the University of Washington.  I liked my high school and was not very happy about leaving it, or Roy, or moving again either.

I did see Roy one more time.  The next year at spring break Mom and my sisters and I went to Portland to visit my grandmother.  WA and Oregon have different weeks for spring break even then so I took the bus over to my old school and tracked Roy down.  We had lunch together and said goodbye.  He hadn't known I was moving since I didn't know about it either as usual.  He said he wondered what had happened to me.  We promised to write but neither of us ever did.  Hope you are having a good Valentine's Day Roy.