Sliding Doors
Everyone has had those moments that in retrospect, were a pivotal episode in life, for better or worse. Perhaps it’s fate, a random roll of the dice, gremlins, guardian angels or the flap of a butterfly wing, but life changed or didn’t.
It’s happened a few times for me, but the first was Thanksgiving weekend in 1975. I was a sophomore at Kent State, a campus filled with students from out of state who found tuition and room and board reasonably affordable. My small Tallmadge, Ohio, world opened a crack. Students from greater Cleveland also occupied the town so classes were brimming with New ‘Yawkers’ and Clevelanders. At that time, I was someone who loved meeting new people and trusted that they had my best interests at heart. Yes, I was twenty.
One of my classes that semester was Speech 101, where I caught the eye of a handsome, Jewish boy from the East coast. Steve, I found out later, was having the time of his life wooing and shagging co-eds in an attempt to move on from a break-up. Ok, I ended up being one of those conquests.
Yes, I was twenty. But hey, it was the 70s and I was eager to enjoy everything I read about in “Fear of Flying”. Birth control was easy to get and aids was not yet known. Women were feeling their prowess.
Steve was warm and cuddly, smart and funny. During a car trip to New York where six college students, me and our bags traveled across Pennsylvania for a weekend home, Steve and I sang show tunes in the back seat for hours before dropping off the other riders in Paramus, New Jersey.
I had always idolized New York City and Steve brought me there. It was my second visit though. My first was when I was three. My father, who also loved New York, a place he visited several times while being stationed in Lakehurst, NJ, drove his family there in our ’58, canary yellow Chevy. The car had God-awful green interior and no air conditioning and my sister who was a sprawling nine year old took up most of the sticky, smelly back seat. We were on a mission to visit my mom’s first cousins in Little Italy and we were lost. Picture this--It’s 1958 in the middle of August, in the middle of a hot, humid car with the windows down in the middle of Greenwich Village. The narrow streets are filled with young people with bongos, guitars, goatees and sandals, when I excitedly yelled, “Look mom, Beatniks!” Yes, I was as excited as any three year old meeting Mickey Mouse, except I thought I was seeing Maynard G. Krebbs. My limited frame of reference only included family, Captain Kangaroo, Soupy Sales and Dobie Gillis, so it’s natural that I would recognize a man with a goatee sitting on the curb playing the bongos. This little known story was always a favorite of my mom’s. To date, I think it’s one of my more defining moments.
That second visit to New York included a Broadway play, bagels and a walk through Central Park all of which made me feel like Marlo Thomas spinning in wonderment through Manhattan. But like most relationships in your twenties, Steve and I fizzled, sputtered and died. I wasn’t “That Girl” to him so he moved on to more available bed buddies..
During that same Speech class though, I became friends with a girl who worked at Channel Five, WEWS in Cleveland. If you lived in northeast Ohio anytime from the 60s through the 90s, you knew the weatherman at ABC. Don Webster, who had put himself on the radar with “The Upbeat Show”, a showcase of local and sometimes national bands, was the quick-witted predictor at WEWS and apparently single. My new friend from class thought I was perfect for him and set up a meet and greet on Thanksgiving weekend.
That’s when fate, or more appropriately Lake Affect stepped in.
If you live near Lake Erie, you know the drill. One day it’s 75 degrees in November and the next the heavens open up and dump a foot of snow. That’s Lake Affect. (For more information, listen to the song, “The Edmund Fitsgerald.”) Thanksgiving weekend in 1975 brought a huge snowstorm that stopped my world in its’ tracks with downed power lines, impassable highways, interrupted events and cancelled schools. Needless to say, the famed meeting was off and because campus was shut down and it was the end of the semester, I never saw that girl again.
My brush with local fame never happened. I sometimes muse about what might have evolved if that snowstorm had stayed in Canada, but God had other plans, experiences, heartaches, sweet moments and just plain living ahead of me.
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