Nowhere Man

I came across a Facebook posting recently. I should qualify that statement with the proviso that initially I needed to set up an organisational account for something, and a previously part-completed, unused personal profile seemed to auto-activate when the organisation account went live. At that point, a few people began to include me in their posts on my reluctantly personal account.

As such, I don't really exist on Facebook, or, if I do exist, it's only by proxy. I seem to be party to anniversaries, triumphant cake-baking displays, holiday photos of someone's toes in the sand, and pleadings to 'get right with God', and even if I remain steadfastly un-Like-able, I receive email reminders that 'someone you may know' would like to be friends.

All of which leads me to the recent posting mentioned above. Through a series of neural messaging algorithms, I found that someone whom I took to a high school prom in 1967 is now practicing law in California. I say now, but in fact she's been there decades. At seventeen, she was beautiful, with thick, blonde hair and a face of classicly beautiful proportions, flawless skin and ice-blue eyes.

Oddly, at the time, she wasn't one of the most popular girls. She had a few friends, was nice, studious, and was generally well-liked in an unobtrusive way. She was one on those people whom you see every day but take no real notice of, until one day, you happen to be looking their way and realise, "My God! She's gorgeous!"

When I asked her to the prom, she was completely unprepared for the question. I was a little bashful, calling over to her across the hallway, and then watching her face change as she realised she was being asked out, only a few days before Prom Night (I said I was bashful.). We both smiled, looked at the floor and wandered off with our friends.

I never had the wherewithall to date anyone properly - no job, no car - so prom night was my only venture into Beautiful Girl Land at the time. The next time I saw her was about three years later. I was in a bar on the Kentucky River, and she came in with an older guy, Jack, and they then went round the back of the place where he had a small rented room; he worked part-time at the bar and the room was an add-on. Through a previous arrangement, I had to stay nearby that night, and next morning the bar owner, to whom I was related through my sister's marriage, asked me to knock on Jack's door as he was late to start work.

When I knocked, she answered, "He'll be there in a minute." I don't know if she realised it was me, calling (I only said, "Jack..."), but I knew it was her, in bed with Jack, a divorced bartender living in a one-room flop behind a bar.

If I ever had occasion to meet her again, it might be because I happened to be in California, or it might be because I happened to be in California and needed a lawyer. Either way, the coin is in the air as to whether I'd remind her of our prom date way-back-when, or the morning I came knocking, a stranger beyond the door, hoping, perhaps, for a glimmer of recogntion, if she remembered me at all.