Sadie Hawkins

It is rare that one knows where they were thirty-six years earlier, not in general but in specific. In my case it is the afternoon of February 29, 1972. I was in college, in my fifth floor dorm room to be exact, a very young freshman. That afternoon an even younger high school senior took the train and came to visit. We met her once in a post long ago.

It was of course leap year day - Sadie Hawkin’s day - the one day when a woman could formally chase a man. Now we were a modern couple, but this was long ago and we both had a healthy sense of whimsy. So that afternoon Allison took the train, probably cut out of school a mite early, and came to visit. She had a present – not quite finished, so she used the bathroom (dorm’s do not have many places to hide) for those final touches.

When she came out it was with a little box – light colored stripes if my memory serves me well – and inside wrapped in gauze was a shell, a shell from our beach, and she had carefully inscribed it. At the time I did not realize the words were famous, there were no camps in my background. In her light handwriting was:

You are my sunshine,
My only sunshine,
You make me happy
When skies are grey

And then her nickname. It is a hard memory all these years later and I know why; it was a time of such innocence, an innocence that once lost, as it always is, can never be regained. But remember I did – Lord knows why – and it stuck in my memory as the morning morphed into afternoon. And during that time I struggled with a simple question. You see I last saw her a decade ago and I am a packrat when it comes to telephone numbers. A simple question: Do I call her?

For anyone who knows me it is easy to guess the answer. Call her I did, a brief message on her voice mail. And then around 3 PM, around the time thirty-six years she was handing me the shell, she called, as chipper as ever. With the slightest of jogging she remembered the day. It seems that neither of us has had a Sadie Hawkin’s day since.

We spoke for twenty minutes, not about that day or our pasts, but about our lives today: a decade is a long time. There was a comfort in it and an honesty. Nothing for this boy to hide, not anymore.

As I thought about it after, there was one thing that struck me. I remember the day, the shell, the quote. I could describe the dorm room in perfect draftsman detail. One would guess that we made love, a perfect coda to a special day, a day I was chased by the love of my life. And while we very well may have made love, I don’t remember and I am sure nor does she. The thing is that it is such an unimportant detail. The joy, even back then, was between my ears, not my legs.

As that old post details, three short months later, it ended, crashed and burned. I carried the shell with me for maybe a decade after that, a talisman of that day. Eventually I suppose it became too embarrassing, a secret for new girlfriends to find. It was lost. It would have been nice to look at today, not to pine but to remember that time and to finally look back from a perspective of being happy being me.