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Fate, karma, the aligning of the stars, providence. These are variations on a simple theme, that sometimes stuff just happens that you didn’t see coming. You don’t see these times coming, by the way, because though they are extraordinary events, they hide in the hedges of the ordinary.
Ted Ring was something of a stereotype. Tall and gangly, awkward and goofy, yet still, friends with just about everyone. He was neither handsome enough nor athletic enough to become a BMOC (though he did eventually commit himself to learning to kick a football, and did well enough to do so for his college team.) All Ted was was friendly without trying too hard, and it paid off for him, and eventually, for me. Ted was the guy that everyone knew. He lived in Ligonier, and our paths crossed first on sundry sports fields. I suppose I noticed him first because his father had been my gym teacher once upon a time. But our friendship first blossomed on the baseball field. I was playing second base, and somehow, probably an error on our part, he was standing on second. We began to rib one another, and someone, I can’t say who, took it a step to far. Verbal barbs escalated to real sword rattling, and after the game, in the parking lot, we did a pretty good imitation of two girls fighting, heads back, eyes scrunched shut, and arms spinning like a scene from the Dutch countryside. Precious little contact was made, though I remember my reputation took the bigger hit. I was trying to hold his head down so I could get in a good uppercut, and some blamed fools interpreted that hold as if I were pulling his hair. I mean really, I’d never do something like that.
That fight pretty well sealed our friendship, and when our paths crossed we tended to hang together. That’s the kind of town Ligonier was. You could go the movies alone, or the arcade, or the fair and catch up with a friend there. (In fact I remember one night that Critter and I found each other at the theater, and finding the movie boring, took his “switch-blade” comb from row to row, snuck up on the unsuspecting, and clicked it open at their throat.) Ted and I went to different schools, and different churches, but we kept in touch around town.
Which is why it was so utterly ordinary that I ran into him that night at the Mountie game. I was in my last year at the Valley School. I was too old for local Little League, or Midget Football, and so had seen less of the local folks than I was used to. But I still spent many a Friday night watching high school football. The Ligonier Mounties were like many small town teams, the center of attention during every fall. It wasn’t necessarily their prowess. It was that they were local. I don’t remember a single state championship, nor a single graduate that ever received a Division 1 scholarship in all the years I paid attention. There were heroes to us, Barry Roddy, Chris Keck, but the closest we ever came to the gridiron big time was when a local girl became Mrs. Joe Namath, however briefly.
There were at least three different ways to watch the Mounties play. Like the other kids, when I was in grade school, “watching” the game pretty much amounted to a two hour long game of Smear the uh, Strange Guy, in one of the dark corners of the stadium. There the weekly highlight was the brief window between the end of the first half and the appearance of the marching band. For ten minutes we took the game onto the field, under the lights.
When you became a grown-up, you started watching the game like a grown-up. You found a seat in the bleachers, and you stayed there. You brought your own thermos of coffee, and didn’t even get up to get some popcorn. But in-between being young and old, then you watched the game standing along the edge of the field, right behind the home team’s bench. You didn’t see much action that way, but that wasn’t the kind of action you were looking for. This was the junior high version of the stock exchange. You walked about looking for friends, girls, or more likely, a party to go to after the game. That is, unless you were as naive as I was. I stood there just to get closer to the game.
On this particular Friday, late in October, I was romantically unattached. Cathy Slater, my most recent girlfriend, didn’t react well when she found out I hit on her best friend on our class camping trip. (Her best friend wasn’t too wild about it either.) I had spoken for a few minutes with Ted, but he or I had moved on that evening. It was a beautiful night, but still, I wasn’t expecting much of anything. About the end of halftime Ted approached me. “You’re not going to believe it,” he told me, his eyes almost, at that moment, as big as his nose. “You see those three girls over there?” And already I didn’t believe it. Ted, like the rest of us, could dream big about girls. But, like a lot of us, Ted made a great friend. Between the two of us, no doubt, we must have had hundreds of girls give us, with all due earnestness, the, “I really want to be your friend” speech. I was guessing that maybe Ted had asked these girls for the time, and when they were gracious enough to reply, he mistook this for agreeing to be his wife.
“Yes, Ted, I see them. In fact, I know one of them. The red head is Janet Steckly. She goes to Covenant church. I’ve seen her around there.” He was so excited that my cool, Sherlock Holmesian assessment of the situation didn’t even dampen his enthusiasm.
“Well, I was talking to these three girls, and they said they all thought you were cute.” Okay, at this point my enthusiasm had joined Ted’s. They looked from the beginning like nice enough girls, even attractive, each in her own way. But now I knew that they had an even better gift, they were filled with aesthetic wisdom. They recognized quality when they saw it. “And here’s the best part. They want you to choose one of them.” Wow. Go to the game without a girl, and go home, after having had my pick. I knew then that even now, over twenty-five years later, that that night would still live with me. I had known girls to think boys were cute. When I hung out at the mall with Jim Cardinal, my “brother” I witnessed it happen. We’d meet a few girls, the pretty one would go for Jim, and the less attractive would be angry at me that I wasn’t as handsome as Jim. But here were three of them, and each wanted me.
For all my excitement I knew it was time for careful reflection. How I chose here might influence the rest of my life. (And believe it or not, it did.) It was tough to get a good look at them, because they were all looking at me. But I managed to make a careful assessment. First, there was the cheerful one. Karen Burke was her name. She looked like an awful lot of fun, though perhaps a little boy crazy. I figured she was the one who came up with this scheme, which meant, in turn, that she had the most riding on it. She had chipmunk cheeks, which I thought was just grand. Second, there was Carol Schmucker. She was the earnest one in the group. I figured she didn’t much like the arrangement, but being outvoted, there wasn’t much she could do. She stood there looking rather sullen. She had long, straight blond hair that caught and then reflected the moonlight. And the third one was Janet. She was herself a walking cliché, the very epitome of the girl next door. She had braces, and auburn red hair pulled back in pigtails, and of course in between the braces and the hair was a face full of freckles.
Having made my initial analysis, I came to the frustrating conclusion that I still had no idea how to choose. For a brief moment I wondered if they would mind all being my girlfriend. That notion, thankfully, passed quickly. I asked Ted his opinion. He, because he was a gentlemen, or perhaps because he didn’t want to show his hand and was hoping to console the losers, said nice things about all three of them. I told him that I was concerned that if I didn’t choose Karen that it might hurt her feelings. I told him Carol looked like she might like it less if I did pick her. Ted assured me that Carol was level-headed, not indifferent, and that Karen’s bounce would bounce right back should I not choose her.
There are, where I now live, several restaurants that know what my “regular” is. This is because though I don’t go out often, when I go out, I tend to go to the same places. And when I get there, I almost always order the same thing. I know what I like, and what I like is what is familiar. I’m not one for taking risks. That’s why they’re called risks. What won the day wasn’t anything superior in one girl than the other, but just that I knew one girl better than the rest. That night, Janet became my girlfriend.
When you are thirteen, at least back then, this had a rather simple meaning. I was more sophisticated than when Corrie Black was my girlfriend, and we just exchanged weekly notes. But we did not go to the same school, and so we didn’t walk the halls together, and I didn’t carry her books. Dates, at this time in my life, were a rare thing indeed. What that left was the telephone. Janet and I were “together” for roughly three months. We had exactly zero dates. And we talked on the phone about the equivalent of three straight days. After supper I would do my homework, and then give her a call. I don’t remember much what we talked about. It couldn’t have been our teachers, because of the different schools. It certainly wasn’t about the beauty of the sunset, because I am a guy. I don’t think it was about how well the Steelers were doing, because she was a girl. (In case you’re wondering, the Pittsburgh Steelers that year became the first team to win three Super Bowls. They would win the next one as well, but by then, I had a different girlfriend.)
Though my relationships with all three of those girls lasted into when I was in college, I never asked any of them about that night. I’d like to think it was because of my own sensitivity, that I didn’t want to open any wounds. Truth be told, I think my greater fear was that I didn’t want to create any new wounds. What if, I feared, Ted had misunderstood what they had said? What if it didn’t happen the way I remembered it? That one night was like a trophy, a treasure, a slice of history that helped me know, what? That my mom dressed me well? That junior high girls have the patent on silly? No, it was just a moment of victory. It was the touchdown I never scored, the rock anthem I never sang. It was providence smiling on me, and me smiling back. It was also, though I did not know it at the time, the beginning of the beginning between me and Ligonier, as well as the beginning of the end. Moments like that don’t happen often anywhere on the planet. But when they do happen, they usually happen on crisp fall nights, with a marching band and a waning moon, and they usually happen in a town like Ligonier.
