Linda Wharton
(written in 2003 & updated in 2015)
Back in 2003, the Class of 1968 reunion committee contacted me about the "In Memoriam" display they were assembling for the upcoming reunion. At that point the growing list consisted of 20 deceased classmates. They had solicited living class members for personal memories of each of the 20, which was to be displayed at the upcoming reunion. But given the homogeneous nature of those who typically participate in this sort of thing, no memories had been submitted for several deceased classmates. One of these was Linda Wharton who has always headed the class "In Memoriam" list, as she was killed in a car accident outside Fitchville late in the summer between 10th and 11th grades. As my time with the Class of 1968 was severed that same summer I have always felt a connection to her.
Fortunately I was able to provide this personal recollection of Linda:
Unlike the Junior High's separate girls' and boys' gyms, the new high school had one massive gym divided in the middle by a huge curtain; with girl's gym classes and locker room on one side and boys' on the other. We only knew there was a girls' class in there because we could hear them laughing and screeching on the other side of the curtain. Twice a month they would pull back the curtain and inflict square dancing on the combined classes, with the boys picking a partner one week and the girls picking a partner the next week. The first time this happened it was boys' choice and I looked around for the safest partner; someone I did not know who was attactive, emotionally stable, and free of irritating sounds and mannerisms. Failure to pair up quickly would mean dancing with one of the "not chosen". I spotted Linda standing with several of her friends and made a very tentative approach. Our first day of dancing came off without extreme trauma, so for the rest of the year we would look around for each other each time they held a square dancing class.
It was a dependency born of mutual shyness and a mutual desire to avoid a host of unpleasant alternatives. But looking back now we had a cute dynamic and it is a nice memory.
Barefoot girl sitting on the hood of a Dodge
Drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain *
I was shocked but probably not crushed by the news of Linda's death just a few weeks after we had last danced with each other. Of course I was already experiencing high anxiety adjusting to my new town and high school (Strongsville), which would have kept me distracted; and it wasn't like Linda and I had made an especially close connection. Yet at the time our association represented tangible evidence to me that I had finally managed to pull my mind out of a very bad place. I needed this validation of my rejoining the neurotypical world and it was not something I was likely to actively solicit. So it would be fair to say that during the last year of her life Linda had a very positive impact on me.
Looking back many years later, if there was romantic potential in our future it would qualify as one of history's most star-crossed. On that first day of dancing, we were blissfully unaware that we were facing an ill-fated future of epic proportions. In the fall of 1965 the idea that neither of us would be returning to the high school the next year was unimaginable, we had been in the school system our entire lives. Ashland High School was soon to be a world without us in it and how strange that in a room of sixty people we had unknowingly paired off for our last year.
All of which works as an illustration of the "free will vs destiny" question. While we are often tempted to believe that altering some past choice would change everything, it is far more likely that the concept of "free will" is an illusion. Our internal programming combines with outside randomness to place us on a path from which there will be no designed deviation. Even if we are able to recognize our destiny (which rarely happens) we have little hope of significantly influencing anything with our free will. And even that small possibility would likely be subject to a regression to the mean.
* Although "Jungleland" was released nine years after Linda's death, I immediately connected it to her and ever since I've associated this connection with my readjustment blues. I had just returned to the world and was struggling with the transition from military life to the academic pressures of Cornell, with getting back into the game. And somehow memories of 1967 & 1968 summer nights drinking 3.2 beer at Lorain County Speedway got juxtaposed into it all.
The song begins with a sense of desperate hope that slides slowly into despair and defeat. It opens with the hero "driving his sleek machine/over the Jersey state line" and meeting up with the "Barefoot Girl," with whom he "takes a stab at romance and disappears down Flamingo Lane." The last portion describes his final fall and the death of his dreams in the "tunnels uptown", and the love between him and the "Barefoot Girl." The song ends with a description of the apathy towards his semi-tragic fall and the lack of impact his death had - "No one watches as the ambulance pulls away / Or as the girl shuts out her bedroom light."