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I first met Debbie Sheron in January 1980 during my senior year of
college. She was a freshman and had just split up with a guy she
had been dating during her first semester at Taylor. It was
Friday night, and a group of us were looking for something to do.
Someone suggested a movie, and before we knew it, a dozen of us had
piled into the back of a pickup truck and headed for Muncie to see the
movie Kramer vs. Kramer. I sat with my back to the cab
next to Donna Pino, and Debbie sat on the other side of Donna. I
rested my arm on the tool chest behind us and tried to stay warm.
It can get cold in Indiana, especially when the temperature falls
below zero at night, and we needed each other’s body heat just to keep
from freezing. There must have been ten of us in the back of the
truck, and we were crammed in so tightly that none of us could move.
After the first five minutes of our half-hour
drive into Muncie, Debbie’s hand started hitting mine. “Go ahead
and hold my hand until we get to the theater. After all,” I
added, with a touch of sarcasm, “that is what you have been trying to
do ever since we left campus.” I never expected Debbie to take
my feeble attempt at humor seriously. She did, though, and
without saying a word, Debbie slipped her hand into mine.
Sometimes guys can be a little dense, and I was
one of the densest when it came to seeing the obvious. I should
have asked Debbie out. Instead, we just started hanging around
together. We did the usual—going to dinner, taking walks, and
seeing an occasional movie—but never went on a real, serious, genuine,
honest-to-goodness date. It didn’t dawn on me until years later
that if Debbie would hold my hand in the back of a pickup truck,
chances are that she probably would have gone out with me. I
should have asked her out, showed up at her dorm with flowers, treated
her to the time of her life, and kissed her goodnight, promising to
call the next day. That’s what I should have done.
Instead, I asked her out, took her to a movie, and when we got to the
door of the theater, made her pay for her own ticket. Believe
me, I know what you’re thinking. And I’ve often regretted not
doing things differently.
A few weeks later we saw another movie together—Singing
in the Rain, with Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connell, and Debbie
Reynolds. I forget who paid for the movie that night, not that
it mattered. By that point, Debbie and I were such good friends
that who paid was no longer an issue. What I do remember is
showing up at her dorm, carrying an umbrella under my arm on a night
when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
“What is that?”
“It’s an umbrella.”
“I know that,” Debbie said with a slight chuckle.
“Why did you bring it?”
“I figure that if we are going to a musical about
rain, the least I can do is play the part.”
I think I had more fun that night than I had ever
had in my life. Debbie and I walked down to the Pizza Inn
afterward to get a bite to eat, and on the way I took out the
umbrella, opened it up, and began dancing in the middle of the street.
Debbie was having a pretty good time, too, and when I visited her more
than a dozen years later, of all the things that we had done together,
that’s the night she remembered most. That night and the one
when I took her to the movie and made her pay her own way. I’m
not exactly proud of that episode, and I had hoped that after all
these years Debbie might have forgotten about my ill-mannered
behavior. Don’t count on it! Although she is now married
and lives in a different state, she still remembers.
I wasn’t the only one around campus who had his
eyes on Debbie that semester. Tom Wilson was a skinny freshman
from Indiana who liked Debbie just as much as I did. She once
told me about a date they had. When it was over, the poor guy
looked at her and, with a straight face, asked if she minded being
kissed because, he said, he had never kissed a girl before. I
may have been pretty inept at dating, but even I knew that sounding
desperate is the wrong way to impress a girl.
Sometimes Debbie and I would run into Tom around
campus, and the look on his face when he saw the two of us together
just tickled my insides all the way down to the bottom of my toes.
I loved the idea of being the object of another guy’s jealousy.
That was a new experience for me, one that tended to be very good for
my ego.
Now, I, of all people, know what it must have
been like for Tom to see the two of us together. I’ve been in
his shoes too many times to make light of his wanting something that
he couldn’t have. But I also have to admit that, for once in my
life, it felt pretty good to know that someone else was left wanting
what I had, instead of the other way around.
I really liked Debbie, and she and I became best
friends that semester and spent at least some time together every day.
Never in my life had I felt so close to someone. There was
something about Debbie that made me feel good about myself as a
person. She accepted me. She didn’t care what other people
thought and genuinely enjoyed spending as much time with me as
possible. Yet, despite that acceptance, I never felt safe enough
to be honest with her. For that matter, I never felt safe enough
to be honest with myself, either. I could not admit to myself
that I really liked Debbie and wanted her to be my girlfriend. I
had plenty of friends. What I wanted was someone to date and
eventually marry.
We went for a walk one Sunday in early spring and
ended up down by the river, about a mile and a half from campus.
It was one of those picturesque afternoons with the temperature just
right and a slight breeze blowing through the trees. On the way
home, I wanted more than anything to put my arm around her and tell
her how much I cared for her. I almost did, too. I had my
hand almost to her shoulders but pulled away at the last minute.
I just couldn’t do it.
It’s one thing for two people not to date because
that’s what they both want. It’s something else when one of them
is haunted by so much shame that he finds it impossible even to broach
the subject.
Debbie came to watch me graduate from Taylor at
the end of May, and as I drove her home afterward I knew that I was
saying goodbye to a big part of my life. I was going back to
Wisconsin to work with Youth for Christ, and she had three more years
left at Taylor. We wrote a lot that first summer, and when
school started again she began dating Dave, the guy she had split up
with eight months earlier. They married three years later, after
finishing school, and I went to their wedding with Donna Pino, the gal
who had sat between us in the pickup truck on the night we met.
I even caught the garter, but that only added to my frustration.
Debbie went home that night with Dave. I went home with a piece
of blue cloth and memories of a friendship that could never be the
same again.
I was excited for Debbie. She had found a
good man that she dearly loved and will spend the rest of her life
with. But at the same time I felt sorry for myself. I
wanted the same kind of happiness that she and Dave had. For
years I had been searching for that someone special to share my life
with, and knowing Debbie Sheron was the closest I had ever come to
finding her.
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