Musings & Thoughts for Monday, November 13, 2023, or: Memories, Anniversaries, and Other Matters of the Heart

Late Morning/Midday, Monday, November 13, 2023, Lithia, Florida

Greetings and salutations, folks. It’s a cool (77°F/25°C) late autumn morning on a humid and cloudy day in the Tampa Bay area. What little light filters through my closed Venetian blinds is dim and gray, so it’s not a gorgeous November morning here. The forecast for the rest of the day calls for mostly cloudy conditions and a high of 82°F/28°C. Something to keep in mind, I suppose, when I go out for my walk later this afternoon.

Since I’m moving to Madison, New Hampshire in a little less than a month, I have been checking the weather there daily. Currently, the temperature in my future stomping grounds is 34°F/1°C under sunny skies (but…it feels like 50°F/10°C, so…). The forecast for the area calls for mostly sunny skies and a high of 40°F/10°C. I’m sure that once I arrive and get used to real winter conditions, I’ll adapt to my new environment; I did that as a kid when we moved back to Miami from the chilly Andean climate of Bogota back in 1972 – the difference there, of course, is that I was coming to Florida (where I was born) and a warmer (okay, hotter) climate at sea level from a huge urban area that sits on a plateau nearly 9,000 feet above sea level.

Tempus Fugit – It’s Anniversary Time…Again

As I mentioned in a recent post, the quirks of the calendar mean that November 2023 mirrors those of November 1972 – one of the most significant months in my life, especially when it comes to my topsy-turvy love life.

If you have read Tempus Fugit: Remembering Cheryl T- 50 Years Later, Part the Third, you know that last Friday was the 51^st anniversary of my departure from Coral Park Elementary School and the involuntary ending of my first childhood romance – the briefest (and most innocent) of all my adventures and misadventures with women.

I don’t remember if school was out for Veterans Day on Monday, November 13, 1972 – my memory isn’t that good, and I did suppress the memories related to Cheryl Thigpen and my brief stint at Coral Park – but if it was, I must have been incredibly sad and nervous; I missed Cheryl and had just learned that Mom had somehow “lost” the report card envelope with her phone number on it, and the next day would see me riding a Dade County Public Schools bus to Tropical Elementary, the nearest school to my house in Westchester’s Coral Estates Park neighborhood with a Special Education department.

I’d gone to school in a minibus to Colegio El Nogal when we lived in Bogota, so I wasn’t scared about the bussing issue. I was nervous about making new friends at Tropical, and I was not too thrilled about losing my first girlfriend only days after I expressed my true feelings for her. So…that Monday 51 years ago was not one of my happiest days, and I’m not surprised that even in 2023 I have only fragments of memories of it instead of total recall.

On Thursday, November 16 it will be the 51^st anniversary of the start of my second – and longer-lived – childhood romance (it lasted four years and three months!). I wasn’t familiar with the term “rebound relationship” or the fact that when you’re young, your heart is more resilient than you think it is. This was my first experience with “attraction at first sight,” and it’s also the last time when I threw caution to the wind, walked up to a girl, and boldly said, “I think you’re pretty. Can I be your boyfriend?”[1] (If I recall correctly, this was also the first time I kissed a girl on the lips. I don’t remember kissing Cheryl; if I did, I kissed her on one cheek. I should have gone for the lips, though…)

Matters of the Heart….

I’m not sure if remembering stuff like this is good or not. I am susceptible to bouts of deep melancholia when I look back at my past, especially my past loves, and I often wonder if my last relationship will be, you know, my last one ever. I am, after all, 60, not exactly well-off financially, and disabled, so I’m not feeling particularly confident that I’ll find a new love up in Madison.

 Part of me, of course, hopes that I do; I am, at heart, a deeply romantic fellow who still wants to find love and affection. But…my past experiences with women have left me…well, a bit less confident and willing to put myself back in the dating pool, so, part of me is, you know, unsure about matters of the heart.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for my mandatory rest break, so I’ll close for now. I will try to work on Reunion: Coda sometime after 2 PM; I’ll more than likely focus on edits and rewrites to the existing “copy” rather than write new material, but…who knows what might develop between now and the end of my rest break, right?

So, until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.

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[1] Or something along those lines.