Jerry Ball on “The Girl” (AKA “Prelude to No Kiss”)

One of my e-mail correspondents has noted that the overview of my post on arriving at RHS mentioned three topics at the top of my memories of Randolph - basketball, mentors, and “The Girl” – but I only followed up with details on basketball and mentors.  I never returned to the topic of “The Girl”.  Okay. Sigh.  I’ll go there.  In doing so, I will disregard the wisdom from Thales of Miletus:  “A multitude of words is no proof of a prudent mind”.

Let me reset the stage.

We’re “brats” so we’ve all been there.  The first day in a new school.  When you walk into a new school on or near an Air Force base, do you remember how you would keep your eyes open in hopes of running into somebody you had known at a previous base.  I had my eyes peeled all over the place but, alas, not a single familiar face. 

I did see one girl that I would like to have had become a familiar face to me.  I glanced around the room, saw her, and it was as if my mental MP3 player had clicked onto the soundtrack of “South Pacific”:

Some enchanted evening

 You may see a stranger,

 you may see a stranger

 Across a crowded room

 And somehow you know,

 You know even then

 That somewhere you'll see her

 Again and again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qJjkbXGj1s

And, of course, in a school as small as ours, I did see her “again and again”.  I even tried to engineer opportunities to be close enough to talk to her.  But if you remember me at all, you will recall that I was not especially skilled in social graces. Especially with her.  Whenever I was near her, I was pretty much unable to talk.

Once I had the wonderful idea of visiting her at her house in the expectation that a less-public environment might be more conducive to conversation.  As I walked there, my heart channeled my inner Freddy Eynsford-Hill from “My Fair Lady”:

I have often walked

Down the street before,

But the pavement always

Stayed beneath my feet before.

All at once am I

Several stories high,

Knowing I'm on the street where you live.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwhUipIX_oA

While my heart may have been confident when I started my mission, my brain channeled a teetotaling Raj Koothrappali while there.  “On the Street Where You Live” morphed into “The Sound of Silence”.  I am sure that after my short visit, she wondered, “What the heck was that all about?”

And my “walking home” music on my inner iPod foreshadowed a future Simon & Garfunkel hit:

I have my books

 And my poetry to protect me;

 I am shielded in my armor,

 Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.

 I touch no one and no one touches me.

 I am a rock,

 I am an island.

 And a rock feels no pain;

 And an island never cries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKY-smJ6aBQ

It may be a coincidence that that song has been hardwired on every Walkman or iPod I have own since.

And so it went for the remainder of the school year.  A perfect game.  No runs, no hits, no errors.  Hence the subtitle on this post – “Prelude to No Kiss”.

Despite the “no contact” situation, “The Girl” still remained in my mind – surprisingly so.  But to bridge to the next “The Girl” segment requires that I provide a little background information.

In the spring of my senior year, I received a scholarship offer from the National Merit Scholar competition.  I also earned an appointment to the United States Air Force Academy.  Had I taken the Merit Scholarship money, I had planned to study political science at a major university.  But, at Randolph, where it seemed like half of the senior boys applied to go to the Air Force Academy, to turn down the appointment would have been like Moses trying to give God back the Ten Commandment tablets.  My going to USAFA also freed up money to help my parents pay for my sister Janet (RHS ’67) to go to college.

I don't know that the Air Force Academy was the best college match for me, but I made it through.

The first year at a service academy is deliberately tough.  (Or it was at that time.)   We had to double-time (run) everywhere we went.  We could not take a straight line route from place to place, but had to run on the grid of marble strips that covered the terrazzo (a large paved area that connected the buildings of the cadet complex).  When we got to an intersection of the marble strips, we had to slow to a walk to make a square turn before resuming double-time.  At meals, we had to spout rote information from a book of quotations any time an upper classman told us to - thus leaving less time to eat.  We could not go out of the immediate area of the cadet dorms and academic buildings without a special permit to do so.  We could not wear civilian clothes.  We collected laundry bags to go to the laundry and delivered them back to the rooms when they returned from being cleaned.  Meanwhile, we carried at least 18 semester hours of coursework including calculus, chemistry, physiology, etc.  It pretty much sucked from the 28th of June of 1965 to the second week of May of 1966 when we were put through "Hell Week" - the final phase of abuse before being "recognized" as worthy to be cadets.  I had been warned about the "doolie" year, but nothing could have prepared me for it.

During the summer of 1965, we had lots of physical conditioning and endless rounds of military training.  (Some of the military training films would have been interesting had I not been so hungry.  I remember watching a film on the Army Air Forces in WWII.  The film showed B-17s bombing a tire factory in Germany, but I swear that my hungry mind saw pretzel sticks being dropped on chocolate covered doughnuts.)

Okay.  Now back to “The Girl”.

On one afternoon, we were doing the classic calisthenics.  One member of the class of 1966 was calling out the cadences while his classmate, mounted on a raised platform, demonstrated the exercise as we did it.  It would have looked something like this:

The '66er who was demonstrating the exercises later on became the first cadet to "max" the cadet physical fitness test - a perfect five hundred point score - so you get an idea of the kind of condition he was in.  His name was Thomas S. Brandon - and he was built like a Greek god portrayed in a fine art torso statue.

After the conditioning exercises, we started on our afternoon run.  Cadet Brandon was leading our group (called a "flight") of about 45 cadets and he had run about a football field length when he called the flight to a halt because his shoe lace had come loose and he needed to tie it.  One of my classmates chose to make the comment, "What's the matter, Sir?  Can't you take it?"  That was an error. 

As Cadet Brandon stood up from tying his shoe, he turned and looked at our group with his piercing blue eyes, and every one of us knew that this was not going to be good for us.  So we ran.  We ran up hills and down hills.  Where he spotted muddy places, we ran through them so that we could add the weight of that muck and mire to our sweat.  Other flights finished and headed for the showers.  We continued to run.  I looked for some kind of mental diversion to allow me to avoid the aching of my joints and the tearing of my lungs in the thin Colorado air.  So, my mind went back to “The Girl” who first caught my attention in the opening days at Randolph High School.  I envisioned her and me riding in a two-seat convertible sports car through the Italian Alps.  Of course, at that time I had never been to the Italian Alps, but I figured the Italian Alps looked a lot like Bavarian Alps and I had been there.  So as my body struggled over real rises and falls in the Rockies, my mind drove through fantasy ones on Alpine mountain roads with the pretty girl who had never ridden in any kind of car with me and who was blissfully unaware of any attraction that I had to her. 

The ruse worked for me.  Eventually, Cadet Brandon knew that he had to turn us loose so that we could shower and get to our next formation.  He halted the flight - and I returned to North America from my mental sojourn in Europe.  I was one of seven cadets still remaining in the group.  I had made it.

And that is why the Italian Alps became one of three places on my “Bucket List”.  Unless we receive comments or requests to go in a different direction on the blog, my next post will talk about bucket lists and I’ll ask you to tell me if you have one.  If you do, I’d like to know what places are on it and how many of them have you visited.

So, I’m going to sign off on this bittersweet set of memories and hope for comments from you.

Jerry