I Don’t Know, I Just Don’t Know
He told me that he heard her name for the very first time while speaking with his girlfriend on the telephone back when he was 15 or 16 years old. He said it was almost a year before he ever saw her face and then a few months after that before he met her.
“The funny thing,” my friend said, “I met her and it was kind of like a group thing, but our eyes met, just for an instant, and something happened, and that was like years ago.” I can’t recall the conversation we had that night verbatim, but my friend shared a tale that it is one that, over the years I have revisited in my own mind from time to time and haven’t found the handle yet. My failure to fully reconcile his tale, I have come to discern, was the very reason he shared it with me in the first place. For the purpose of protecting the parties of which I speak, I’ll just call him Joe and her Sally.
Joe’s dad owned a construction company and I had landed a part-time job with them one cold, cold winter. During Christmas break, I was able to spend a couple of weeks helping on a big job out of town. There were four of us that rode a little over two hours to the job site every day, leaving about 4:00 AM. We drove down in a single cab truck, with a camper shell on the back. I mention this because like I said, there were 4 of us and only 3 could ride comfortably upfront for that distance, so we “cast lots” each morning to decide who rode in the back.
After that first week, we got a paid on Friday and we stopped at a roadside tavern on the way home. Joe’s dad, Harvey and the other guy, Noel, were shooting pool, leaving Joe and me at the bar. After a few drinks, Joe, seemingly without provocation, began telling the story and though I was “comfortably numb,” I listened and I heard what he said.
He said, “I saw her and I couldn’t speak.” I thought that he meant that he was unable to strike up a conversation with her because they were with a group at first. But he continued when he realized that I heard, but didn’t follow. He said, “You don’t understand. I saw her, I looked into her eyes, and I LOST the ability to speak.” I said, “Oh, you couldn’t speak at all, laughing.” “Right,” he said, and “That shit ain’t funny,” I told him that I wasn’t really laughing at him, but that I was just trying to make sense of it. He said, “I know man. I know.”
Joe shared that story with me almost 40 years ago, and it has crossed my mind from time to time. Sally married her high school sweetheart and has since divorced. Joe and I had limited contact over the years. I knew that he had married and divorced twice, but a couple of years ago, we met up at a ballgame and afterward, we decided to go get a drink. We ended up sitting on a picnic table by a secluded lake, with a handle of bourbon and red solo cups.
After dispensing with the mutual bullshit of wives, kids, and work, just catching up, we began to talk about us and the talk became more personal. It’s funny, we have the story that we present in these situations that is more or less generic and only covers the surface. But when old close friends get together in a more private setting, we forget that armor that we wear and find our way back to the true bonds that we formed long ago and it is as if we were right back where we were then. The bourbon loosened us both up a bit and we shared some of the failures and the losses of our lives, and we felt the old kinship that we shared all those years ago.
The conversation reached a pause and I remembered the old story and had to ask. I said, “Hey, you told me a story that crosses my mind from time to time. What about Sally?” He fell out laughing and followed, “You remember that?” I replied, “Hell yeah, I remember. I’ve thought about that story many times over the years.” He said, “Man there is more. I’ve run into her since and there is more.” I laughed and said, “More, really? There is more? Tell me.” He told me that for a brief period, she worked at the daycare center that kept his daughter and he would see her on the evenings that he picked up his child and he still couldn’t speak, or coherently at least, to her. He said, “That’s not all. I was with my daughter one day when she was about 13, and we were going into a bookstore just as Sally was coming out.” He followed, “I can tell you what shoes she was wearing, but I couldn’t speak to her.”
So, here I am, telling this story of a story that in its origin, involved a guy who we would assume was just a little too shy to speak to a pretty girl. But the inability of our hero here to speak in subsequent meetings, well, it just defies explanation.
In essence, Joe heard about Sally, saw her at some function in town, then met her and had some paralytic episode for which now, even after almost 40 years, he still hasn’t come to grips with. And I, having heard the tale, have had a similar result.
Was she so beautiful to him that he couldn’t speak? I don’t think so. She was one of the prettiest girls in the county, no doubt, but I don’t think that in itself sums it up. And I don’t think that there was some cosmic force that would have brought about a big explosion if only he’d fought through it and found a way to communicate with her.
To date, I have no explanation for the phenomenon. After considering Joe’s predicament many times over the years, I have nothing. Furthermore, I resign myself to the fact that if I live for another 40 years, it is likely that no resolution will be obtainable.
There you have it, the story of a man rendered stupid by a woman. He wasn’t the first, nor will he be the last to be rendered stupid by a female. The two things that make this stand out though are these. First, it is NOT the fact that Joe was rendered stupid by this woman, but that he was rendered stupid and speechless. Secondly, this wasn’t an isolated experience; it was a lifetime of experiences.