Fragments From Floyd

Fred, thanks for the comment. I think revisiting a past love is a lot like dealing with the question of going home again (with apologies to Thomas Wolfe). Since my return to Floyd County, one question I get a lot is: "What's it like to come home after 40 years?"

It's a challenging, enlightening and sometimes dangerous path. Visiting with an old flame can resolve issues left open from so long ago or it can rekindle bad memories. I lost track of my first wife after we divorced in 1974 only to learn recently that she took her own life on Christmas Eve in 1998. That brought back sad memories of how depressed she would get during the holiday season.

Yet so much of our culture today revolves around the past: oldiest radio stations, nostalgia parties and even The History Channel. You raise a good question on whether the ghosts of the past should stay there. Hell, I don't know.

Doug

I suspect this kind of research is the only real reason for high school reunions.

But those of us who dated beyond high school--in my case, way beyond--must all have that One or Two or Five who just keep popping up. Once in a while, I get half in the bag and do a tour through Yahoo People Search. And if I don't think them up on my own, I dream about them, sometimes in spells of different characters popping up every night. Sometimes it's an old lover and we have pleasant, occasionally hilarious, more occasionally X-rated visits. Other times, it's the hall monitor from 7th grade--I just never know who's coming to dinner!

True story: my grandmother and her highschool boyfriend (who drove her around in the sidecar on his Harley!) drifted apart after he went off to WWI. 60 years later, she and her daughters took a cross-country RV trip, visiting all the places they'd lived. In Iowa, they went to her home town (called something like Swan Lake; I forget); Gramma found him in the phone book, much to her surprise, and called him up; he said, "Come right over! My wife's been dead six months." So they all rumbled off to the same farmhouse from 1917. Not a dry eye as my mother and her sisters watched these two old people do their fastest shuffle through the tall grass of his front yard, straight into each other's arms.

Ultimately, being mostly deaf and somewhat infirm, he couldn't bring himself to leave home and come back to California with her. But for the rest of her life, about ten years, she referred to him as her boyfriend, and he faithfully phoned her every Saturday morning at 11 to chat for an hour. He died just a few weeks after she did. Now they're back on the Harley, roaring around Heaven.

So ANYTHING's possible. Just one of the many lessons I learned from her.

Never, never, never try to go back is my motto. I guess that explains why I remarried my ex-husband 11 years into our ex-edness (and we're still going strong 16 years later!) Unfortunately/fortunately, on occasion, one or the other old boyfriend (from the 11 years) pops up in the newspaper or in person and I get that "deer in the headlights" feeling. It's nice to know what's happening with people that we've lost track of, but I personally have no desire to meet in person. Most of the guys that I dated in high school or college are either dead or forgotten (at least, I can't remember their last names!)