Romantic Meanderings

This section should have a warning label as it is where I have relegated the most egocentric of my thoughts.   I feel that I should apologize for it on general principle.

It has turned out to be kind of a miscellaneous collection of thoughts on my romantic side.  Created because I kept appending my "Not So Glorious Alice Crusade" page to the point that it looked like a comment section.  So I stashed that stuff over here along with some related material.   You won't need a great attention span for this section because it is all pretty random but it might help to read the Alice page first. 

https://sites.google.com/view/2013babyboomerblog/secrets-to-living/life-lessons

Leaving Alice and returning to the world in September 1974 I traveled from McGuire AFB in New Jersey to Minot AFB in North Dakota in my right-hand drive 1958 Mercedes 190SL.  I call this my "Do the Right Thing" drive because it involved much solitary contemplation about my guilt over abandoning Alice - remember that innocence thing.

And I thought about a calico bonnet from Cheyenne to Tennessee

 In Morgantown West Virginia I purchased a southeastern college football magazine which included these majorette photos. The redhead a very healthy looking Alice look-alike who introduced simple lust into an already too complicated equation,  as if I needed reminding.  At the time I'm sure I took the coincidence as another sign that Alice was my destiny.  But it brought to the fore the second issue I was juggling.   The growing conviction that Alice was the best that I was ever going to obtain and it would feel so good if that relationship was still in play.   I was certainly in love with her and had been for several months.  Meaning that I could alleviate my growing feelings of guilt and get something I really wanted at the same time.  The two issues were of equal importance to me and both were pushing for the same thing.  Although I relentlessly argued with myself for several weeks it was simply an exercise in futility. 

 In retrospect the high I should have been experiencing from returning to the world after three years overseas was largely spoiled by the angst of indecision during those first months, a real downer.

Simply put,  my struggle to leave Alice behind during this drive was simple common sense fighting with a wondrous illusion that I had created.   Common sense rarely prevails in such situations and regrettably it did not prevail here.   Still there is something glorious about the whole silly thing.

So why do I still view The Glorious Alice Crusade as a tragedy?  Because my underlying motivation for contacting Alice after I escaped was to help her or at least to alleviate my guilt for deserting her.  You see this all grew out of living off base with a Holly Golightly type WAF the year before,  with my trying to help her until (as a result of a miscommunication) I grew so exasperated that I asked her to move out.  Largely simple jealousy on my part as anything else.  I had partially atoned for this by trying to destroy myself but my then guilt began to return when I saw myself as leaving behind Holly Golightly #2,  someone I judged to be even more vulnerable.  And to my credit I looked behind me and tried to atone for both failures.   

In this case I needed some acknowledgement and validation of my seemingly selfless efforts.  Of course my motives were entirely selfless.  Both Holly's were smart and attractive young women - I had not chosen to shower my attentions on a couple of random hags.  So I don't claim sainthood - just a capacity to be a better person thanks to an active conscience that tends to pay attention to the human condition.

But Alice was not only unappreciative,  she was mildly disparaging.  And while I have absolved her of the responsibility for much of our delusional dynamic she dropped the ball at the end.

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And finally we come to Tina, the path I was on when Alice entered my life and the path I would not follow because of Alice. Not taking that path has long been the biggest regret of my life. But these new disclosures should allow me to stop beating myself up over my decision. It was simply impossible for Tina or for that matter anyone to compete with the Alice I had created. I had unknowingly set up a situation that could not have broken any other way.

And speaking of competing, it is hardly surprising that the summer of 1974, made magical at least in part by my inventive imagination, made all subsequent romantic relationships rather underwhelming for me (yawn). There may have been a high cost there but probably not, it is at best a break even proposition where the happiness gained would have been offset by additional woe.

"I fell in love seriously for the first time, with a girl who lived on Spanish Lake, outside of town, and as is always the case with your first love, I remembered every detail of that season, as though I had never experienced a summer before, sometimes with a poignancy that would almost break my heart. I'll never forget that summer, though. It's a cathedral I sometimes visit when everything else fails, when the heart seems poisoned, the earth stricken, and dead leaves blow across the soul's windows like bits of dried parchment." James Lee Burke

Burke and Fitzgerald are both expressing the most intense and positively powerful aspect of the human condition, one that not everyone experiences. Alice allowed me this experience, in retrospect the most intense months of my life. And because after considerable hesitation and reflection I made the choice to not run away, she gave me a lifelong self-worth that I otherwise would not have had. In this way the episode takes on a kind of grandeur.

Author's Notes:

Even without my embellishments the real Alice, wide-eyed and fresh from the States, was an attractive package and we matched up rather well. So there were considerable reality-based reasons for my initial interest.

For the sake of narrative flow I have simplified the internal process of my beginning to perceive flaws in Alice. The best way to cope with this type of rejection is to diminish or denigrate whoever did the rejecting. Unfortunately such a coping mechanism was not initially an option under the circumstances, for a while Alice was sacred. That left me to fall back on the second best defense, which was consistent with my feeling that she was not overburdened with perception (that assessment from someone who obviously at the time was even less perceptive). Either I was not the "catch" I had once believed (I was not exactly overburdened with humility at the time) or Alice was simply not sophisticated enough to appreciate it, most likely some of both. It was the same disconnect that would occur if you tried to impress a small town barmaid by bragging that you have an 8 goals polo handicap or by telling jokes about Avogadro's constant.

"Love denied blights the soul we owe to God."

Shakespeare probably had that right. At the very least love denied should produce a pair of people with a lifelong bond of fondness for each other. Failing that those feelings must either be purged or be redirected toward something worthy of them. Otherwise they will blacken your heart. But redirection is an obscure concept. And therein I suppose lies the reason for my recent euphoria about discovering the Godspell connection, as instead of redirecting toward a substitute it is now possible for me to redirect toward the original object.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/21/what-if-you-could-do-it-all-over?utm

During my years in England there were three girls who really touched my life.  They were very different from each other; a dynamic that I have always summed up as:  Holly was for living with,  Tina was for doing things with,  and Alice was for dreaming about.  Of course the ideal was to find one girl who fit all three criteria but I have never been able to find one girl who represented an improvement in any one of those three areas.  

Holly was the first one and she was gone before I had even met the other two.  Based on that until very recently she has been overshadowed by them.   But Holly has now displaced Alice although I suppose that Tina holds an edge in my idealized memories.    I miss them both.   I no longer do any dreaming about Alice.  

She was the first song I ever sang

But it stopped as soon as it began

The American Graffiti Effect

Allow me a moment to blow my own horn about my decision to propose. I recently re-watched "American Graffiti", a film released in the UK in 1974 which I attended off base - at a theater in Luton - after meeting Alice and a few weeks before returning to the world.

You may recall that one of the story lines involved Steve (Ron Howard) and Laurie (Cindy Williams) as a couple facing the breakup of their relationship the next morning, when Steve was scheduled to depart for his first year of college back east. After much teen angst Steve elects to stay home with Laurie, guilt-tripped into giving up his dreams and effectively ending the progress of his life. George Lucas reinforces this with his ending disclosure that "Steve works as an insurance agent in Modesto".

While this may have been why I never considered a career in the insurance industry and why I once actually turned down a job offer in Modesto, it also implanted the belief that Steve had made a huge sacrifice by not abandoning Laurie. An admirable action given his pure motives. And that general attitude probably has a lot of cultural reinforcement,

Then six months later I am busy guilt tripping myself about abandoning Alice - with protectiveness a huge part of my motivation for proposing, misplaced as it may have been. The bottom line being that I reluctantly made the decision to sacrifice my dreams for her. Something both cool and foolish at the same time. And the fact that it went totally unappreciated accounts for a fair amount of the difficulty I have to this day reconciling the rejection. And the fact that I still feel minor resentment confirms that doing the right thing by Alice was a significant factor in my decision.

A few more days of mental processing has me rather anti-climatically concluding that the long dormant and not so glorious Alice crusade of 46 years was finally imploded by the Godspell revelations. That is because when viewed in the light of those revelations all the alternate timelines flowing from the "what if Alice had loved me?" construct (with all of its alternate Jeffs and Alices from all of the different possible realities) have been rendered unappealing and in some cases quite horrific. I wouldn't trade my current reality for any of them. Perhaps Alice was more perceptive than I had thought.

Although I have spent the last 50 or so years in denial of this,   on the most fundamental level Alice was and probably still is poison.    Originally my denial was because Alice was sacred and I refused to taint her with what should have been all too obvious assessment.   After all she had been responsible for the most magical summer of my life.   My later denial was because in my moments of clarity I realized that my expectations for her were too high and were in large part the product of a subconscious whimsical fabrication. And then still later because I felt unfit to judge;  as her rejection of me was so absolute that any human in such a situation would find it extremely difficult to summon up much good will. 

Now it all sort of comes back to that final point.   To make a proposal and have it rejected is part of life,  in the case of a marriage proposal one is in effect saying that I offer you  everything I am,  everything that is mine to offer, everything that I hope to be.  When that offer is refused the implication is that they have assessed you and your future prospects and found that you are simply not good enough,  that they believe they will easily get a better offer.   That is always a bitter pill although often  brutally accurate.  Even worse is when the rejection is in terms that make it clear that you are regarded as a inconvenience.  Assuming of course that you have not been such a tedious and persistent pest as to actually be an inconvenience.  If not that level of rejection is unnecessary overkill.  

So objectively why is this sort of overkill a bad thing?   Mostly because you have already made an ass of yourself by getting hard over about the wrong girl,  and that sort of overkill rejection just amplifies something that a decent person would make an effort to smooth over.   Secondly,  the person doing the overkill  rejecting is turning a flattering (if unwanted) bit of attention into a huge negative.    What should have been at worse a warm and fuzzy positive for them and a boost to their self-esteem has gone way past neutral to less than zero.   They have managed to leave everyone  including themselves with a negative vibe.

To be fair Alice may have initially panicked and sought to extinguish me as unambiguously as possible.  But I responded quite sanely and given a little time most people would have walked some of that back simply to limit any lasting damage.  Yet we were in contact for several months after the rejection and her attitude that I was of little consequence never showed the slightest sign of softening.  

I credited her with far more intelligence and perception than she actually had,  it is obvious in retrospect that she simply lacked the capacity to appreciate me,  which I should have picked up on far earlier than I did.  It would have saved me considerable anguish and wasted mental energy.   This disconnect is the key to the whole situation and not something for which she can be blamed although certainly something for which she can be deprecated.

Switching to the third person - you've got this guy who over a period of a few days one January goes from being a NCO in the Air Force to an intimidated undergraduate at an Ivy League university.  During the transition he was forced to abandon his car halfway between his air force base and the university,  and to recruit a couple of his old high school buddies to drive him to the university where the housing office parks him car-less in a dorm with an 18 year-old roommate.  

And weighing on him the whole time is the fact that a few weeks earlier the girl he was mostly doing this to impress informed him of her complete indifference to his existence.   He has accepted this development and elected to go ahead with his ambitious college plans.  He really has accepted it although it makes no immediate difference because even if she was madly in love with him any future courtship and certainly any marriage plans would be on hold for several years.  

After a couple days he is able to move to a graduate student dorm and restore some sanity to his life although his adjustment process is far from over.   At this point he reluctantly contacts the girl and explains his situation.  Basically pleading with her to go through the motions of a friendship;  detailing the adjustment challenges he is facing and the importance of some level of support from her.  The totality of her support will amount to a one page letter so cursory and so begrudgingly written that 50 years later that he is still embarrassed for her.  

A month later the father of an Air Force friend writes him that his son was killed in a car accident in California.   This causes an almost immediate attitude shift and he snaps out of his feeling of helplessness and gets into the game.   His first semester he is the only one in his study group to get an "A" in Labor Law,  a course that has much the same reputation at the school that Kingsfield's Contract Law class had in "The Paper Chase".  His success in overcoming all these obstacles provides enough sense of accomplishment to last a lifetime and he becomes one of those rare people not driven by a need to compensate for some inadequacy - or at least he likes to think so.   Dream on Jeff! 

Note: Although this subject is an important one in my life I realize that it is not of any cosmic significance nor a cause for overwrought melodrama. One good thing about getting old is that one (hopefully) begins to grasp one's own insignificance, something I find surprisingly comforting. At age 20 I strongly felt I was in for a F. Scott Fitzgerald like romantic destiny, specifically some mix of his Monroe Stahr - Jay Gatsby - Dexter Green characters. And this eerie prescience was amply demonstrated in this romance.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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I used a quote from Fitzgerald in the last part of the Chicksands Reunion story. It was from his short story "Winter Dreams", a story I read just before I went in the Air Force in May 1971. The story left me stunned, emotionally overwhelmed to a degree unlike anything before or since. I really "get" Fitzgerald, so much so that I think there is some kind of spiritual connection between us, and I am not one to normally believe in such things or to invite that kind of thing into my thoughts. I was convinced after reading "Winter Dreams" that I was destined to live the story and essentially finished doing so at the Chicksands Reunion. Of course there is always the possibility that it was a self-fulfilling destiny, that I subconsciously latched onto it and made it happen although that would have required a degree of mental discipline and 25 years of coincidences the totally of which seems highly improbable.

I did dodge a bullet, however, in 1976, when I missed or ignored the movie release of "The Last Tycoon", based on Fitzgerald's last novel. "Unfinished at the time of his death, F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Last Tycoon" is a story of doomed love set against the extravagance of America's booming film industry. The studio lot looks like 'thirty acres of fairyland' the night that a mysterious woman stands and smiles at Monroe Stahr, the last of the great Hollywood princes. Enchanted by one another, they begin a passionate but hopeless love affair, starting with a fast-moving seduction as slick as a scene from one of Stahr's pictures. The romance unfolds, frame by frame, watched by Cecilia, a thoroughly modern girl who has taken her lessons in sentiment and cynicism from all the movies she has seen. Her buoyant humour and satirical eye perfectly complement Fitzgerald's panorama of Hollywood at its most lavish and bewitching."

Ingrid Boulting (doesn't she look Irish) played Kathleen Moore (the doomed Last Tycoon's love interest) and yes there is a startling physical resemblance to the girl of my "Winter Dreams".

I strongly believe that had I seen the film at the time of its release, less than two years after my Air Force discharge, that it would have sucked me back into my own doomed relationship and strongly reinforced my feeling that I had some special Fitzgerald connection. Valid or delusional, I simply did not have enough perspective at this point and likely would have indulged in some serious self-destructive behavior. I finally watched the film last night, 38 years after its release and 40 years almost to the day of my Air Force discharge. Even at a distance of almost four decades the viewing experience was intense, and my first glimpse of the Kathleen Moore character quite memorable.

I believe that my natural love for a woman is the Storgic type.  Such people tend to be stable and committed in their relationships. They value companionship, psychological closeness and trust. For these individuals, love relationships can sometimes grow out of friendships, so that love sneaks up on the pair. This love style is enduring, and these individuals are in it for the long haul.  Yet this tale is about how even something so earthy is ultimately controlled by subtle forces of destiny in the guise of free will.