Old galfriends

A coworker asked me a few months ago, "Do you ever wonder what happened to your old girlfriends? Do you ever wonder what they're doing now?" I answered, "Hell, no!"

I've gotten to a stage in life where I understand about unfinished and finished business. Some folks never do, so maybe I've got an advantage. I know when a relationship is over. I knew my relationship with Cathy was over when I was in the Army and got a Dear John letter from her. She told me she'd met someone else and they were going to get married.

I met Cathy when I was just short of 17, and she was barely 15. I was a junior in high school and she was a 9th grader. I suppose her folks were pretty liberal by letting us go out together, but usually we double-dated. Parents thought that was safe. It really wasn't; instead of one couple in a car necking you had two couples, but I digress.

Cathy and I practiced the relationship business on each other for about three years, and we made a lot of mistakes. Kids don't understand the process of courtship, the process of getting to know a person of the opposite sex, getting disappointed, getting dumped, getting your heart broken. We went through the process with monotonous regularity. We'd get to a point where we'd be fine, then something would happen and we'd be fighting again.

During one of our fights she went on a date with a classmate, who ran his Volkswagen Beetle into the back end of a parked car, sending Cathy to the hospital with her teeth knocked out. Luckily the boy's dad was a dentist who fixed her teeth for her. But the hidden damage was that she sustained some sort of brain injury. I never found out what it was.

After she was out of my life I got lucky. I met and married my wife, while the guy Cathy married divorced her at some point. I have no idea what happened to her after that, and after I get through writing this I'll go about the business of not thinking about her for say, the next 40 years.

Some people never get over former loves. Some still feel love for a person long gone out of their life. I'm not telling anyone how to feel, but I think I'm just more pragmatic. I don't waste time on someone who's gone. When a relationship is over it's time to just move on, not fret about what went wrong or worry about getting the person back. Not long after my youthful romance with Cathy ended I moved on, lessons learned.