fox

When I was fourteen, I fell in love with a camp counselor.

He was in charge of a cabin's worth of eight- and nine-year-old boys. Even now, I don't know many people who would volunteer for an assignment like that -- but he took to it like a fish to water, and those kids adored him. I don't remember when I met him, but it wasn't too much longer before I was smitten.

There were always a handful of people at the center of everyone's attention -- counselors, instructors, older campers, accustomed to being the Beautiful People -- and he wasn't one of them. As I recall. He wasn't shy and retiring -- you can't be, and expect to keep control over ten eight-year-olds for two months -- but he wasn't the Why, Yes, I Am God's Gift sort. Good-looking, yes. And let's be honest -- there isn't a person alive who doesn't care. [g] But that wasn't the point with him, and that just made me fall even harder.

I hope I wasn't obvious. I've always tried so hard not to be. To this day, people can find me hard to read when I set my mind to it. My close friends can tell something's up, when something's up, but not usually what's up unless I tell them. I play it close to the vest. :-) I tipped my hand toward the end of the summer, though, I think -- I was far more reckless then than I am now [g] -- and once I was safely home, back in my real life, I laid it all on the table. (That's the end of the poker metaphors, I swear.) I wrote a letter.

God. I spilled my guts in that thing. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and I don't remember ninety percent of what I said. The basic gist, if I remember correctly, was "(a) you're wonderful and (b) you don't understand, I don't get like this and I don't know what to do with myself now." This went on for about twenty pages. Handwritten. By a fourteen-year-old.

At this remove, part of me wishes I'd kept a copy of the thing. The reasons for this vary. [g] Sometimes I think I'd look at it and feel a little nostalgic. Pat my inner child on the head and say "there, there." Other times I think I'd get it out and let my inner child use it to beat my outer adult severely about the head. Go ahead and smile and nod, she'd say. Go ahead. But you don't get to forget this. [whap.]

(Plus, that way if I ever became earth-shatteringly famous, it could be published in my Collected Papers once I was dead.)

That was a long time ago. I am almost a year older now than he was then. (I realized this not long ago; previously, when I was in college, it occurred to me one day that he was past thirty, and that gave me quite a start.) And knowing what I do now -- which is far more than I knew then, but of course not nearly as much as those of you know who have lived longer than I have -- I can see that he must have been just not at all surprised. Or, maybe surprised, but certainly not remotely fazed. The guy was a fourth-grade teacher in the regular season. I consider my friends, guys in my class and the year behind me, and that's who he was, at the time. And I look at my friend's youngest sister, who's about fourteen, and her friends, and that's who I was. Jesus.

I was a wreck for several months. I knew it was hopeless, and it didn't matter -- I had lost my heart to this guy, who was way too old for me and many hundreds of miles away and who I'd probably (what, probably. see how i still hedge it, even now?) never see again. Seemed perfectly reasonable to get completely irrational. I was a goner. (Until I met A. J., who broke my heart instead of merely stealing it.)

It's very likely that if I met him tomorrow -- well, I don't know what's very likely. He wouldn't remember me, I'm sure. I'd remember him, because his name is connected to a trip-wire in my brain, but what I'd do upon remembering is what I don't know. At this point, now that everybody's an adult, would we be friends? Would the grown-up Fox be as head-over-heels for the more-grown-up Counselor as the teenaged Fox was for the grown-up Counselor? I never knew for sure how much was Time and how much was Growing Up when I got over it. Never will know, either. I mean, look how long I've gone on about this -- and I haven't even mentioned the possibility that he could be married and have kids. (God.) Or he could have gone into orders. It was a Catholic school he taught at. But because I never saw him again, I have a hard time thinking of as much time having passed in his life as has passed in mine. The years will have been shorter, but they'll have passed all the same.

I wonder where he is now.