As a kid, I had a crush on the same girl for over a year, and never talked to her....

Her name was Laurie. It started when she was in 4th grade (in the combined 3rd/4th grade classroom) and I was in 5th grade (in the combined 5th/6th grade room). I would only see her at lunch and at all-school events, but I was totally locked in on her. I spent the better part of that school year anticipating the next year when we’d be in the SAME classroom. The thing that I remember the most is how badly I wanted to touch her hair. But there was no way that was gonna happen in separate rooms, so I waited that year, and all summer, for my chance.

I thought when my 6th grade year started, that we would naturally get together, but I was too shy to even talk to her. I probably never would have done anything until one day when I saw her sitting with another boy, getting a little too close. The boy had Laurie on one side of him, and one of the two Paulas on the other, and he was serenading them with “Torn Between Two Lovers”. I saw him do that 2 days in a row! I couldn’t believe he had the nerve to actually sing to my Laurie.

I decided that I had to do something daring. I wrote a note confessing all of my feelings for her. I carried it around in my pocket for a week. The day that I finally decided to give it to her, I casually pulled it out of my pocket and put it on my desk. I remember thinking that if I acted too slyly, I would draw attention to myself. So I casually set it on my desk like it was just a regular old folded up piece of paper that just happened to have a heart drawn on it, and not the most important thing that I had ever written.

My anti-sly routine backfired. Within seconds, Frank grabbed the note off my desk, opened it, and began to read it in front of the whole class. I wish I could say that it sparked one of those moments you see on TV where the girl is so overwhelmed by the note that she runs into my arms. In fact, it might have, except that I ran out of the room before Frank even got to the line about how much I wanted to touch Laurie’s hair.

I went and hid in the boy’s locker room behind a rack of chairs. I knew class was starting, but I waited in there trying to figure out how I was going to reenter the classroom with any sort of dignity. 10 minutes later, Kenny and Andy walked in, tried to tell me it was no big deal, and that Mrs. Wolfe wanted me to get back to class. That is where my memory ends. I have no recollection of ever leaving the locker room, or reentering the classroom, and especially no memory of seeing Laurie’s face. I found out later that Mrs. Wolfe had told the whole class to act like nothing had happened. They did, because no one ever spoke of it again. And I made it through the remainder of my torturous 6th grade without ever saying a word to Laurie.

When I was a kid, there weren't a lot of other kids that lived around me to play with.

I lived on the wrong side of the tracks for that. It wasn’t really the “bad” side of the tracks; just more like the “old people with no kids” side. There was a total of 8 kids on my side of tracks, and 6 of them were in my family.

There were, though, a couple of kids that I was friends with who lived out on the highway. One summer, one of these buddies had a cousin stay with him for a few weeks. It was nice to have someone new to hang with and to call a friend. He was from a place that I had never heard of called Decatur. He was kind of quiet, but he liked to play baseball, and that was nice. He told us about cable television and a channel called Home Box Office where you could watch movies all the time. It all seemed a little far-fetched to me. I didn’t know it until later, but this kid’s family had all recently been killed in a house fire - his mom and dad, and his brothers and sisters. He was the only one who survived.

After his Philo vacation was over, he went back to live with relatives in Decatur. He gave me his phone number so we could keep in touch. A few times, I called him to see how he was doing.


My mom wasn’t happy about me having a friend in Decatur that I wanted to call on the phone. According to her, it was expensive to call there. Whenever she let me call him, she would set an egg timer out, with strict instructions not to be on the phone when the timer was up. That’s okay, though, we usually ran out of things to say before we ran out of sand.

Recently, I tried to do a google search of fatal Decatur house fires and his last name, but nothing came up. It would have been interesting to read about it after all these years. It could be that, even though his new home was in Decatur, that isn’t where the fire happened. I’m not sure. To this day, I can't see an egg timer without thinking of my month-long best friend Tim.

Update:  Someone read this story and sent me this interesting link.