First Love
Some of the best times of my early life were spent on my father's old farm in a small town in Northern Michigan called Curtisville. The town consisted of small family farms and national forests, and our closest neighbor was a half mile away. Our house was the last one on a long road that wound past us into the forest.
I was the youngest in our family, and my older brothers and sisters—blood, adopted, and foster—would love to come up and help bring in the hay, then camp and party down by the river. The Murguleskis were a family who lived up the road and around a corner, about 1½ miles from us. They had three daughters, and the youngest, named Suzy, was my age. The girls used to hang out with us at home and down by the river. My adopted brother, John, whom we referred to as Thompson, dated the oldest of the sisters. Sometimes, Thompson became the butt of the jokes because he acted so wild, but he loved the attention. I had another foster brother named Darcy, who was a year older than me. He dated the middle Murguleski daughter, while I, at age 11, went out with the youngest girl, Suzy.
Suzy was cute, with blue eyes and what we used to call dishwater blonde hair. She was somewhat of a tomboy, which was pretty normal for a ten-year-old country girl. I loved Suzy and shared some of my hippie music with her, fantasizing about us being together. The most we ever did was kissing under a blanket on a date. She was stronger than me—at least her legs were. We had one bicycle, and I tried to ride her around, but I couldn't. So, she rode me around instead. I remember one night when she was riding me on the bike in the dark, and a dog started chasing us. We were petrified, even though it was just a little dog from the farmhouse down the road. We fell over and landed in a ditch before walking the bike back to my place. As a side note, a few years later, my adopted brother Paul's Great Dane killed that little dog.
Suzy and I did cool things like catching frogs and picking berries. It was only a part-time relationship because I only saw her when I got to go up north, but I had that sweaty-palmed feeling of young love for her. One time, while I was in Detroit, I bought her a pretty blue ring. The next time I went up north, I gave it to her, but I could see that a lot of the magic we had shared had become as distant as we were in the winter. Once, she wrote me a love letter. I should have treasured it, right? Well, when I saw the letter, I discovered that she couldn't spell at all. That was a total turnoff for me and pretty much sealed the fate of our friendship. I think back on that now and realize how elitist it was, but that’s how my ten-year-old self felt. We drifted apart after that.
Suzy was Polish and lived in a part of Detroit called Hamtramck. When I was 16, my sister Margaret worked as a waitress at the Clock restaurant in Pole Town. The Clock was similar to a Denny's. My sister Margaret got me a job there as a busboy. One day, I saw Suzy in the restaurant with her mother. My sister told them that I worked there, and they gave me a courteous hello, but the magic had gone.