Trivial Matters

I moved many times in the first eight years of my life. Mom worked for a company that kept getting relocated or bought, and we bounced around southern California, Texas, and finally High Bridge, New Jersey.

It was the first day of sixth grade and I found myself in homeroom. (Looking back, homeroom seemed like such a waste of a period. I can’t even remember what we did for the hour or so.) The morning announcements started with the Principal introducing himself and finished with what would become the daily tradition of asking a trivia question. The question on that first day was: What is the official state animal of New Jersey?

“Horse,” came a shy, lispy response from the other side of the classroom from me. (I didn’t know at the time that “horse” would become the word that kick-started my body into puberty at the tender age of 12.) It was spoken by Jennifer Jordan. Jenny, as I would come to call her, was wearing a brand new set of braces and hadn’t quite gotten the hang of talking again. There was some snickering from the other students at how she said that magical word, but I was too shy myself to come to her rescue and quell the laughter.

I think it might have been the fact that she was the only person in the class (and the whole school as it turned out) who knew the answer, or the combination of braces and glasses (which I’m still a sucker for), but whatever it was, I was in love.

It took more than a year for me to work up the courage to ask Jenny out. When we first moved to High Bridge, there was a bar at the end of the street I lived on with an apartment on top for the owners. When they moved, the new owners turned the bar into a pizza/Italian restaurant. One half was the pizza joint and the other half was the fancy Italian restaurant. They had a daughter that was the same age as my sister, so we got to know the family and I wound up working in the restaurant as an unpaid assistant.

When I did ask Jenny out, it was there that I took her for our date. Not having a father at that point, I had to rely on television to tell me about how to conduct a date. Step 1) Get flowers. So, I went to the florist on Main Street and bougth the biggest bouquet with red roses I could afford.

Step 2) Pick her up. Being thirteen, I didn’t have a car and had to get my mom to drive me over there to pick her up. It was a small enough town that I could have walked over there on my own, but I was resolute in following the proper steps. It was instantly apparent her parents were very uneasy with the idea of Jenny going out on a date. (I think the roses threw them off.) My mom had to reassure them that I was a nice guy and everything would be monitored. And so we got in the car and drove back over to the restaurant.

We had the whole place to ourselves, and even though we were sitting on the Italian restaurant side, we ordered a pizza. The owner brought it out to our table, gushing at the young lovebirds. And as we sat there eating and trying to carry an adult conversation, it slowly dawned on me that Jenny had only said yes to be polite. She wasn’t interested in me the same way I was in her. Rather than make her sit there and suffer, I asked if she wanted to go home and she said yes. My mom had been in the other half of the restaurant, occasionally poking her head in to check on us, and I got her to bring the car around.

I dropped Jenny back off at her house, and we never spoke of the date again. In fact, we barely spoke at all after that. I moved to Oregon a year later and we never kept in touch, even though I kept her name, address, and phone number in my notebooks well into high school.

It was several years before I ever got to Step 3 on a date.

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