Nostalgic Beauty

I had a cabin in the Catskills one autumn weekend.  The sun was low, and the leaves were brilliant but there was that touch of bittersweet melancholy in the air that comes with autumn.  I met a young woman named Natalie, serving beer at a Halloween festival, who was nostalgically beautiful.  She was cute as a Pumpkin, so I had to tell her so.  I am getting into that habit lately of trying to be spontaneously and positively honest without being creepy.  It’s a fine line and once you cross it there is no going back.  What else do I have to lose at this age.  She had long auburn hair with sparkly green eyes, freckles galore and a slim but sturdy carriage but she looked at me skeptically a fist.  But she ultimately took it well and thanked me graciously for the compliment, chatting me up for a short while.  Sometimes strangers can be more honest and interesting, for a while at least.  

She told me she was a student at Oneonta and was headed back to school soon with her boyfriend after Fall Break.  I shared ‘that was very cool’ because I had an Annie Hall type friend there, many years ago, almost as cute as her.  We met on an Olmstead bridge in Central Park and went to a concert at the Woolman skating rink.  We went back to our respective schools, at the end of summer, with a spark in our eyes and a pain in our hearts that faded with every mile and every day.   Absence makes the heart frow fonder, of somebody else.     

But I hitch-hiked from South Bend to New York over several days to see her, for fall break.  We went to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown one afternoon and played in the leaves while listening to Billy Joel and Rita Coolidge, drinking cheap beer.  We slept in a corn field under a borrowed blanket and were in love with being in love. I emphatically did not want to go back to school, and I almost didn’t. 

Natalie wondered ‘whatever happened to her’.  ‘It didn’t work out’ but I still see her every ten years or so and would see her again, real soon.  The timing was not right, I told her.  Maybe we knew it and split before it got bad and there was no going back.  ‘When’ you meet people, I warned her, counts as much as how, what, where or why, or perhaps our time was just up.  ‘Some people are destined to be with you for a minute, or an hour, a day, week, month, year or lifetime’, she qualified.   Yes.

It is like some people are better looking further away than up close – the Monet affect.  Some other people have their space-time limit and then move on – the Heisenberg affect.  I have had some dear friends and lovers for a weekend, a season, a semester and a decade and Heisenberg didn’t make me love them any more or less or any longer.  There are also potential people that I missed, for some reason, that had a zero-relationship-lifespan with me or even negative because of what should of or could of happened.  For that I am deeply sorry.  You only regret the people you haven’t tried. 

But I told Natalie that ‘I will see my old friend next week’ and wondered if she would still be fun and funny, cute and cuddly (she was).  As she started to leave, young Nat knowingly said, ‘good luck with that’, implying that it might be a letdown or disappointment (it wasn’t).  I warned her, avuncularly, that beauty and strength are an accident of youth and what matters is the personality, character and soul, that stay with us.  She nodded and smiled, losing interest as she walked away dismissively yet so attractively.  Our time was up.