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   I was pondering today, the unresolved feelings between my younger daughter and her ex boyfriend. (Or at least hers, his may be resolved to his satisfaction just fine.) To understand my concern, one must know that I am a big one for tying up loose ends.  I don’t like stray emotions floating around just waiting to ambush you when you aren’t looking. (To those ends I went so far as to sell the house that my family lived in prior to the finalization of my divorce.  Lots of good karma turned bad in that place. It would creep out of corners when I least expected it and bite us on the ass.  So I fixed that-I bought a new house before the old one was sold and further pissed off my soon to be ex husband. But that’s okay, I felt better and I think in the end my kids did too. Every time a piece of furniture disappeared to his new place it was like a little death that had to be mourned.)

  So when friends or family are by turns hurt, mad, misunderstood or needing something from someone; I always think that confrontation of some type is probably the way to go.  (I suppose the jury is still out on whether or not that works for everyone but it seems to do so for me.) I don’t really care a lot for whose move it really is.  I am a great one for rushing into a vacuum, making a decision and going with it. I don’t tend to spend a lot of time agonizing over what the outcome might be; in my corner of the world action always beats inaction and indecision.

  My first love was during my senior year in high school.  He was the beginning of a series of boys/men who were wickedly smart and also incredibly emotionally complex.  At age 17 or 18 I had no real appreciation for the emotional good or damage that growing up in a unique to each of us family unit can do.  The time period was 1969/70 just before transactional analysis, ‘I’m Okay, You’re Okay (not) and during the period that ‘if it feels good do it’ was all the rage. Oh, and he was pretty cute too. So here’s this smart, cute, funny kid and I liked him. I liked him a lot.  But as we used to say, he was hung up. At that particular time he was living to piss off his parents. It made his day.  He wasn’t a bad kid, just determined not to do anything they wanted him to do. 

  His parents wanted him to be on the football team and he was good at it, so he quit and joined the track team (“for sissies his dad said”) instead.  They wanted him to spend more time with his siblings, so he didn’t.  They wanted him to have an appreciation for music though Quicksilver Messenger Service, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Chicago didn’t really fit their specifications.  They wanted him to have a girlfriend so he got one: me, but I wasn’t quite what they had in mind either. They were pushing a Roman Catholic Republican from church.  I was a Democratic Episcopalian who wore a black armband during the days of the War Moratorium in Washington D.C. Pretty much everything he did was designed to make his parents mad and consciously so.

 Our time together centered on school and our friends on the yearbook staff.  He shot the pictures, I wrote the captions.  Basketball games, political discussions with university students at university hangouts (our town has a large Midwestern university in it), picnics throughout the spring, and late night car rides to the smaller communities surrounding our city to get ice cream became our routine. The band Chicago busted out that year and he loved them.  He had the newest technology as well, a cassette tape player.  Whenever I hear ‘Make Me Smile’ by Chicago I think of him, because he did.

 The high school social calendar culminates in what else, but the Prom.  Even though we had previously decided that the Prom was probably one of the more un-cool things we could do, (and if we were anything, we were cool, I had the granny specs, he had the army jacket) we decided it had a certain campiness to it, so we would go.

 About ten days before prom events were not going well in his household.  He managed to get himself grounded for a few days (one of those late night ice cream trips went a bit too late on a school night)(as I recall that particular time we weren’t really getting ice cream, but it is a good story to tell the parentals-mine didn’t keep track of me so I was in the clear.) And to push the envelope even more, he was engaged in an ongoing pissing contest with his mother.  Every day she would make him a sack lunch to take to school and every day as he left the house he would drop his sack lunch in the garbage can on the way down the driveway.  Two days before Prom night she espied the lunch dump from the kitchen window and Prom was off. It kind of sucked as I had the dress and all the regalia already purchased, but the financial woes of his little hippie chick girlfriend weren’t her concern.  After much glowering and stomping around the house on his part she did relent and allowed him to take me to the after prom party at which she was a chaperone. Purely out of spite we had a blast.

 As it happened I was a year older than he was and moving on to college in the fall.  One night  a few weeks before I moved onto campus we were hanging out and I mentioned something that I thought he would no doubt achieve before he was thirty.  He moved off into his own head as he so often did  (one of his traits that I found so incredibly attractive-the mystery of it all) for a moment and then said that no, he didn’t think he would as he didn’t think he would live to see thirty.  I laughed and asked what did he think was going to happen that he wouldn’t live to be 30?  A shrug was the only answer I ever got.

 So I went to college, he went back to high school for a year and as so often happens we drifted apart. The following year he turned up at the same university I was attending and we saw each other off and on during our college years.  We never really resumed a dating relationship, but we hung out and he without fail would call if ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ was playing at the movies.  We both loved that movie, it had been our first date.  He never forgot and always mentioned that he could never see Butch and Sundance with anyone but me.

 The spring after my senior year in college I received my Butch Cassidy call and we spent a terrific evening reminiscing about old times, drinking beer and catching up. By this time I had become aware that his involvement in the drug scene had increased dramatically beyond the joints we rolled in high school now and again.  He was moving into harder stuff, much harder stuff and that night I expressed my concern. Another shoulder shrug and a not to worry, he knew what he was doing was his response.

   A week later he was dead.

  I still think of him and I still miss him. Or maybe I just miss what I imagine might have been.  So today, going through this thought process I discovered that this is why I am a believer in resolution, confrontation and reconciliation where possible, because none of us ever knows for sure if there will be another chance.