On Puppy Love

The first time I felt really strongly for a girl I was the tender age of 13. (Actually I was just a couple months shy of my 14’th birthday.) It was the October of 1991, the trees looked like they were on fire with their gold and crimson leaves changing colours in the autumn cold.

I recall one day, at lunch my friends and I were sitting in the grass, still rich green but cold when I saw her walk by. I don’t know what it was about her that I was attracted to but while I may have seen her a hundred times before, it was that time that I noticed her.

She was Liese Smart and even now, more than 16 years later my heart still skips a beat when I say (or type) that name. It is a funny thing the male condition, never able to completely let go of things long past.

With nothing in common (in grade 8 not sharing classes meant there were no commonalities) the prospect of ever talking to Liese let alone befriending her was such a marginal prospect that I was left in a profoundly melancholy state. One day at my guitar lessons my teacher sensing this melancholy suggested (I will never forget this): Why don’t you get her a rose, it works for me.

On the advice of my guitar teacher I went to Floral Fair on Yonge Street, I paid $4.94 for a single long stem red which I would soon discover I could not fit inside my locker. No matter, long stem becomes broken stem in my efforts to make it short stem.

I wrote a love a poem and asked my friend Philip who did have a class with Liese to give her the rose and poem.

I wish this story had a happy ending, well I guess it does, I am married today, but not to Liese.

The day Phillip gave Liese the rose was the day of the Halloween dance, and that was the day Liese told Phillip she would never talk to me.

Some months later I found out that at 13 years herself Liese did not know how to handle my affections and did what another 13-year-old friend of hers told her to do. Ironically I established a reputation with my single act of being the resident grade 8 poet, a fact which I foolishly failed to consider as a romantic stepping stone, but I was a lot younger.

To those of us happily married or in love cherish and enjoy it. To the single readers I may have engaged, I wish you luck and I sympathise.