MY BIG DATE

My Big Date

Michael Blunk

 

Men who have entered their middle years often look back upon their youth with certain wistful longings. Not me. My youth was a long, bumpy ride with a lot of uncharted detours along the way. Not that I complain. No one can write who has not first lived and my twenty-third year alone is worth two dozen articles, three short stories, and a really bad poem in which none of the words rhyme. But I digress.

Her name was Jill. She was a friend of a friend and, in my youthful fancy, the fairest of ten thousand. Okay, maybe that is laying it on a bit thick, but from the part of her golden hair to her exquisitely manicured toenails, Jill was a looker with few equals. What a girl!  And word had reached my eager ears through a friend that Jill was in between steady boyfriends, and if I arrived at her door around seven-ish on Friday, she would accompany me to dinner and a movie.  It was all set.

Friday evening took its good, sweet time in coming, but at the appointed hour I stood knocking at her door, dressed in my best threads and bearing a dozen lovely long-stemmed roses. Soon I would be gazing into the face of the world's most beautiful girl. Rap! Rap! Rap!  No answer. Perhaps I had better knock again. Rap! Rap! Rap!  Still no answer. Had I arrived too early? No, it was seven on the nose. And then I heard the faint sound of a television followed by the psssst! of an opened soda can. I knocked again; Jill was home, but she refused to open the door for me.

As cell phones did not exist in those prehistoric days, I drove to a nearby pay phone, but when Jill discovered I was on the other end of the line, she ended the connection with a resounding click.  There was something very sad and very final about that click. Bewildered by such shabby treatment, I drove back to her apartment, rapped lightly upon the door one last time, heaved a deep sigh of disappointment, and left the roses at her door. My broken heart and I drove home. My big date with Jill was over.

 

From time to time, I think back about my big date and wonder why she gave me the old heave-ho.  Maybe I wasn’t her type. Perhaps she figured we were not intended for each other.  And, then again, maybe she was simply a wacko.