Libby Baker Sweiger

Young Love

Dear First Boyfriend Mike at High School Reunion This Summer

“You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss

Young love is so exciting. You kind of tingle all over. It is hard to sleep, at least it was for me. Sleeping has never been my best thing anyway. I was in 6th grade and the cutest boy on the block, well frankly, the whole school had declared his undying love. We kinda liked each other the end of 5th grade too, but there was another boy, Gordy, I also liked. Finally, in 6th grade Mike had enough. The rumor I heard — and you know how dramatic grade schoolers can be — was that he was on the window ledge of the 3rd floor and threatening to jump if I didn’t pick him. Well I told the message bearer of course, Mike was IT for me! I liked him better anyway. There was certainly no reason for anyone to scrape a knee or break a leg over!

I was hooked. He was so sweet. Kind of quiet. I always liked the quiet ones. Probably a safety net provided by God to keep me from having too many boyfriends! Most quiet boys were a bit intimidated by me. Not Mike. He had tons of self-confidence. He was older than I was too. I was a June birthday and small for my age. What I did have that he really liked was long brown hair almost to my waist, very straight.

This continued into 7th grade. It was nice going into Junior High with a really sweet, cute boyfriend. We went to some parties together. Boy/girl parties. At first opportunity, Mike kissed me at one of those parties. Very sweetly. Short. Nice. He was good to me. Only thing was, he loved my hair. He told me if I ever cut it he would break up with me. I didn’t believe him. He couldn’t mean it. It was just his way of complimenting my hair.

Naturally, I told my next door “best” girlfriend Barbie what he said. I didn’t notice the correlation back then. I never wanted to think ill of my friends. But, from the moment I disclosed that tidbit of news to Barbie, my without a boyfriend “best” friend, she started in on me to cut my hair.

The funny thing about girls and women in general is that they seem to care more about what fashion dictates and their girl friends think than what the men who care about them say about their appearance. And while long straight hair was in style in my High School years, I was bucking the trend then. The celebrity model who was big then was Twiggy with hardly any hair on her head at all.

Well you guessed it. My mom and Barbie and I took my beautiful long hair to the department store stylist and got a little trim: to my shoulders. Mike was horrified. And did what any guy with his character would do, was true to his word and dropped me.

I couldn’t believe it. I was stunned. What happened I thought to my self, and said to my girlfriend Barbie. She said boys are fickle, you can’t trust them. It didn’t seem right. I had always been able to trust Mike. I thought, much later, gee maybe he really meant it about the long hair.

He was a sweet boy. I missed him for a long time. You’re too young to articulate things at that age and we never discussed our falling out. I saw him last summer. He came back from California for our 40th High School Reunion. He hadn’t been back since the 10th. We had a great time talking and hanging out a bit on Friday night. We talked about the tree fort he had in his back yard and the fun times we had as kids. Nothing about kissing or hair. He was is the midst of a happy 26 year marriage, me a happy 32 year one! He was still a great guy. I had turned out okay. You can see by our smiles we had shared something pretty special once and we really didn’t need to talk about it. It just was.