But as I worked on it, I found myself often distracted… befuddled by simple questions that begged for simple answers. Do I write well enough to attempt this? Would it be worth sharing? Is it something I should be sharing in the first place?
I didn’t know the answers… nor do I know them now.
Ultimately, I cast aside my doubts and edited and revised the old narratives (a thorny task for a non-real writer like me). I also added a new narrative or two (or three). After that, I began the equally thorny task of piecing it all together… into something (hopefully) greater than the sum of its parts.
And that is what I hope you will find here… for what follows is a story within a story… within another… recounting a tale of young discovery… loss… and rediscovery.
– – –
In his novel “Zoli” Irish author Colum McCann writes, “Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.” I concur, but with a caveat… not all stories begin at their real beginning. This story is no exception, for it begins not at its beginning… but two years later on the fifth day of the ninth month of 1972 or, more specifically, the first day of the boy’s eleventh year of school.
– 0 –
With a forgettable (at best) sophomore year behind him, the boy, just thirteen days shy of his sixteenth birthday, harbors aspirations of rising to the occasion of being a junior in high school. His first class in the morning is English, and upon entering the classroom, he chooses an out-of-the-way seat near a window. And there, he spends the last few minutes before the start of the school year looking out at a world that has always felt distant to him… existing somewhere beyond his self-imposed confines.
At the front of the classroom, his soon-to-be teacher sits quietly behind her desk. Her back is straight, her head upright, and her hands firmly clasped with fingers interwoven. She scans the room, already evaluating each of her soon-to-be students.
The bell rings… and she speaks.
“This is eleventh-grade English. I am your teacher, Mrs. Jackson.”
She unclasps her hands and opens the attendance book that lies beneath them.
“Raise your hand when I call your name,” she says with authority. “I need to learn your faces.”
Afterward, she discusses classroom rules. No food or drink. Be on time. Raise your hand to speak. And most importantly, always come to class prepared to write.
She then speaks about her goals for the class.
“There is a writer inside each of you,” she tells them. “It might be hidden, but I assure you, it is there. Perhaps we can discover it together.”
During this talk, she asks that each of her students begin keeping a journal, one to be turned in occasionally for her to read. Amongst the groans from some of his classmates, the boy inwardly embraces the request.
“Write in it whatever you like,” she says. “All that matters is that you write.”
The boy is pleasantly surprised. Despite his teacher’s stoic demeanor, she appears to harbor a genuine interest in her students… and a passion for writing that she hopes to instill in them. After school, the boy purchases a thick, college-ruled spiral notebook… and in no time, its pages begin to fill with song, poetry, and stories.
– 0 –
In late November, just before Thanksgiving break, the teacher collects the journals for the first time. Then, over the break, she reads each one in its entirety… first entry to last.
– 0 –
Upon returning to class, the teacher seeks the boy out and asks permission to make copies of what he has written. A trove of kind words accompanies her request, which surprises the boy, for he knows that his grammar is often shoddy and his spelling frightful. Yet, for reasons not clear to him, she seems willing to look past all that.
After reuniting her students with their journals, the boy thumbs through his and notices something written next to one of its entries. When he sees which entry it is, it causes him to pause—and remember—for still he knows not how to forget.
There, amongst a sixteen-year-old’s dreams, hopes, and regrets, a solitary quatrain lay hidden…
In the night so softly comes
from somewhere still not known to me,
a tender smile and blush of cheek
that passes by just out of reach.
Beside it, in red, three words are penned… “This is beautiful!”
Even though he knows her praise is genuine, the boy realizes she has no way of knowing that the poem she has singled out is the most telling thing he has written. He closes the journal and pushes it forward across his desktop, creating space between it and himself.
He turns to the window… struggling in the moment… and looks out at a world that knows nothing about him.
And then he dreams… as he so often did back then… of starlight.
– 0 –
“Why do you write about such things?” the reader asked. “It seems you spend more time in the past, amongst regrets than in the here and now.”
“I suppose I do,” replied the writer, exposing his self-reproach.
The writer pauses, ponders his words, and then continues.
“In the end, our pasts ask only to be remembered, and in that vein, I am simply obliging an unassuming request from the one antagonist we all have in common.”
The reader nods… then offers up a half-smile before turning and walking away. And the writer dies—just a little bit more—inside.
– Thomas Smith, Remnants from my dog-eared notebook, October 1976
– 0 –
Four months shy of four years later, in the moments just after the girl disappeared from his sight, the young man succumbed to his sundry of worries and fears. One that, until her leaving, had been carefully secreted away… so skillfully that even she did not know of its existence… and he regretted that, for he knew he should have told her… he knew he should have asked her not to leave.
Turning away from the gate that led her to her plane, he walked past the prying eyes of those he knew were watching. He walked until he found an out-of-the-way seat beside a window… and there, through far too many tears, he gazed out at a world that knew nothing of what had just happened.
And he remained there until his anguish had finished with him.
– 0 –
The young man roved out under a late autumn sky awash with stars. His road that night was lined with reveries and ruminations alike, and each presented itself to him before slipping quietly into the darkness behind him. But it was a quarter moon rising before him that he took comfort in—for it stayed with him well into the night—and when at last he could feel the beckoning of his destination, he began to hope—with all his heart—that he would find there a promise of home.
– 0 –
“I have always liked how latticed windowpanes offer themselves up as a canvas to Mother Nature. Especially when she chooses to dabble in the artsy medium of windblown snow. I, for one, could spend the better part of an afternoon there, watching her work, turning square corners into gentle curves, creating snowy portholes from rectangular panes.” – Thomas Smith, Remnants from my Dog-Eared Notebook, Autumn into Winter 1976
– 0 –
There once was a lakeside pub far to the north where I spent many such an afternoon. It was a time when dabbling (for me) was in youthful things, born of knowing most of my life lay ahead. If I wasn’t daydreaming, I was writing a letter. If I wasn’t writing a letter, I was trying my hand at a song, poem, or story.
One such afternoon, upon realizing a turn in the weather had snuck up on me, I put down my pen and took to observing my fellow pub-goers. My attention was drawn to an older couple chatting over two mugs of warm beverage. They sat across from one other in a booth near the pub's stone inglenook.
The woman’s arms were neatly folded on the tabletop, and she leaned forward as she talked, causing a gold pendant around her neck to swing forward and shimmer in the firelight. Her affection for the man across from her was undeniable; I witnessed it in her manner… and could see it in her eyes.
The man, on the other hand, was a mystery. He looked down more than he looked up and seemed often lost in the reflections of firelight dancing upon the mug before him. At one point, the woman smiled and reached across the table to touch his hand, causing my heart to sink, for his reaction seemed sullen at best. It was as if his thoughts were somewhere (or some time) else… as were mine in those days, far removed from the sanctuary of the pub and the emptiness of the chairs around my table.
It was then that I took up my pen, turned to a new page in my well-worn notebook, and began to write… while thoughts of love beheld, or held and lost, if ever truly held at all, fell softly around me… like snow… beyond the latticed windowpanes.
– 0 –
“Was it really that long ago?” the man asked.
The woman smiled, nodded, and reached across the table to touch his hand. He smiled back in silent agreement, unaware that the woman was seeing him through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old girl from long ago.
Not far from where they sat, glowing embers slumbered peacefully beneath an ebbing fire. Its lambent light shone in the woman’s eyes… and upon a gold pendant she wore around her neck. As she talked, the woman would occasionally reach up and take the pendant between her finger and thumb, causing the small diamond there to twinkle in the firelight… each time seizing the man’s attention and causing something long forgotten to be remembered.
“Starlight,” he eventually whispered.
The woman smiled and raised the pendant to her lips, never once taking her eyes off him. And the man became lost… in the memory of a memory.
– 0 –
The Girl Like No Other
She was quiet and kept mostly to herself. The boy was shy and not at ease when talking to girls. Nevertheless, he fell for her. And as it happened, she found out, and then he found out that she knew, and that led to the day, in the freshman English class that they shared, when he looked her way and smiled.
What happened next was nothing short of magical to the boy. The girl blushed as red as a southwest summer sunset and smiled back with the loveliest of smiles. It was the first time he had ever seen her smile, which made the moment even more special.
The boy could not look away, so the girl looked down, and then up, and then down again, before finally raising her eyes to meet his… and in those eyes, the boy saw something that he had never seen in a girl’s eyes before.
But all of this was new to him. And that kept him at a distance… bringing the boy’s only mistake to light. He thought he had time. But no. As the boy searched for his courage, October gave way to November, and the girl, with never a word being spoken, was gone.
The boy went from searching for his courage to searching for her, but she was nowhere to be found. Finally, in desperation, he asked his teacher about her. She told him the girl had moved away. Then, realizing the boy’s question was something more than a simple query, she added in a consoling whisper, “I’m so sorry.”
The boy sat quietly for the remainder of the class. He spoke to no one, and no one spoke to him. When the bell rang, he left the classroom and made his way down a crowded hallway lined with bright orange lockers… and then slipped unnoticed out one of the school’s backdoors. There, with his back to a cold white brick wall, beneath a November sky that threatened rain, the boy cried until the heavens answered him back.
As his high school years tumbled by, the boy thought of the girl often, especially when he was alone or feeling unhappy… but never once did he mention her to anyone… not even his closest friends, for even though he was young, he knew there was no triviality in knowing she would remain wistfully in his heart for years to come.
~
He found himself always at a loss for words around her. She had a way of doing that to him. And to make matters worse, his shyness kept her at a distance. So, they dated, and he wrote her letters, and when alone, he would pick up his guitar and work on the song he was writing for her.
It was early spring, just before Easter, when he gave to her a plush stuffed rabbit, hoping that, in some heartfelt way, it would help convey his feelings for her. She seemed genuinely moved by the gift and named the rabbit Harvey (after one of his favorite movies). And during the tiny slice of time that followed, as they sat together in his car in front of her house, he found himself so much wanting to reach out and gently turn her face toward his, for in that moment, he truly believed that he had found someone special, and perhaps, just perhaps, had even seen something in her eyes.
But no. As he searched for his courage, the girl began to slip away… so he wrote her one last letter, but rather than answer it, she slipped away for good. And the girl, with never another word being spoken, was gone.
It broke his heart to find that, in the end, all of what he felt was unrequited. And as he thought about his part in all that had happened (for he blamed himself mostly), his thoughts turned to something he had read in one of his literature classes… “Hearts are made to be broken.”
He had always thought it to be a statement about resilience but now believed it to be a testimony to something inescapable in life. He retreated into separateness and packed away the love song he had been writing… leaving it unfinished… and unsung.
~
It was not lost upon him that she always saw the best in him, even when he could not… and also that she never once perceived his shyness to be anything more than something temporary. He did not know it at the time, but she was extremely cautious when it came to matters of the heart, for she had known disappointment and now guarded her own heart diligently.
Yet, it did not take long for the girl to realize that something… this time… was different. The thought of giving her heart away to this boy came easy to her.
It was March, and winter was gently yielding to spring when he gave to her a gold pendant that held a speck of a diamond… for a speck was all he could afford. And even though he tussled with his shyness that night, he was happier than he had been in a long time… for the girl that he had so unexpectedly, and surreptitiously, fallen in love with the summer before had already revealed herself to be more special than any girl he had ever met.
As he looked on with guarded hope, the girl, surprised and beaming, put the pendant on. And when she looked up at him, he could not look away, for in her eyes, he saw something he had only ever seen in a girl’s eyes once before.
“Starlight,” he whispered.
And later that night, on her doorstep, as he looked down and then up, and then down again… the girl like no other, reached out and gently turned his face toward hers. And during the tiny slice of time that followed, when they kissed for the very first time, the universe paused… and took note… for everything—absolutely everything—was as it should be.
– 0 –
A few days after the young man arrived at his destination, he penned a letter to the girl. In it, he told her where he was… and that he hoped the weather in California was pleasant… and then—all of the words that his heart had withheld from her came pouring forth.
Her reply came as quickly as a letter could traverse the three thousand miles between them. In it, she opened her heart up to him as he had done for her. And even though she could not say when she would return, she promised that she would… and that she would never leave again.
– 0 –
When the woman lowered the pendant from her lips, the man found himself standing once again upon her doorstep… lost in the presence of the most beautiful thing God ever bestowed to the face of this good Earth… the smile of a seventeen-year-old girl in love.
– 0 –
When I looked up from my notebook, the man and the woman were gone. It disappointed me not to have noticed their leaving. So, I put away my pen, closed my dog-eared notebook, and moved to a table near a window. And there I looked out at a world that still knew nothing about me… and watched as it slowly disappeared beneath a blanket of silvery moonlit snow.
And upon that, I dreamt… as I so often did back then… of starlight.
