At sixteen: Boys, launching into life

As part of the never-ending sorting and packing, I came across a box of my diaries from high school.

I paused to dip into my sixteen year-old self, formed (I thought then) yet so naive. My interests were absolute clichés: school, boys, friendships.

Occasional world and family events were noted, but the parents who loved and reared me took a backseat to young men whose names I'd long forgotten.

The summer I was sixteen, though, I dated a boy whose gifts brought renown. Of course, no one knew at the time. His family had a summer place in the area; he was the golf buddy of a friend at my school. We met, went out, had fun, then summer ended and he returned to Kansas City. We wrote each other a few times (I was impressed that he had personalized stationery), then soon pursued different lives.

I missed him, though. When his friend said, "Tell your boyfriend to give me back my club", I wrote his command in a September entry, but can't remember if I ever passed the message along.

By Christmas I was crazy about a pale, anguished guy who dumped me for my girlfriend Julie on, I see, April 7. The next true love appeared in several months, confirming my mother's assurance that "Men are like streetcars, one along every five minutes."

What intensity (did I ever merely like somebody?), yet what innocence. Kisses were all I was willing to document; I well remember there was not much more. Some of the entries had me laughing and scolding my teenaged self: "Wake up, dummy, he's not interested", or "Twenty-two is way too old, run!"

The boy who took the club was named Tom, as was the friend who wanted it back. Both Toms grew up to become golf pros, not a surprise; my mother remembered how the thump of his bag hauled up the steps announced the slight, polite, strawberry blond boy, even before he rang the doorbell.

Last summer, I happened to see Tom Watson kiss the bridge at St. Andrews in fond farewell to the course where he played his last British Open. I thought, "Oh! There's Tom!" and the years fell away, his ebullience and easy grin unchanged.

Still smiling

Emmet County Fair Ferris Wheel

In my diary, I read that I too had been kissed–"practically in public!"– on the Ferris Wheel at the Emmet County Fair, by the young man he'd been on a starry August evening in northern Michigan, 1964. 

Funny, isn't it, that if he had not become one of the true sports greats, I might be just now be reminded, forty-seven years later, of his name, too, along with Dave and Robbie, Dick and Don.

Each of us had taken our seat on the big wheel of life, lifting to the stars. The future spread before us, glowing like the midway, expansive and exciting. A few years later, some boys would serve in Vietnam; several did not return.

I'd see others at reunions or hear of their milestones from my parents. "None of your friends are in jail at the moment", Dad loved to tease.

I wish each of us, as we edge into our sixties, several more glorious turns before the wheel begins its last return toward earth.