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I am reasonably intelligent but I never excelled in High School because, in the immortal words of all of my teachers, I didn’t “apply myself.”  If I were interested in a subject, I would get something out of it. If I wasn’t interested, forget it.  I was smart enough that I could always get a C just by guessing.  If I halfway-listened in class, a B was no problem.  If I actually read the book and did the homework, I never failed to get an A.  But because I wasn’t all that interested in most of my classes, I didn’t even finish in the top 20% of my class.  My board scores, however, were off the chart.  That was enough to get me into college.

College was a given in my family.  Attending wasn’t even discussed or optional.  The only topic of discussion was where.  During my senior year, I applied to Harvard, where my brother had decided he was going to graduate school.  I also applied to Princeton, where my brother was an undergraduate.  I applied to Purdue, where my father went for two years.  I applied to Northwestern where my father went at another point in his life.  Finally, I applied to Michigan, because Barbara Bressler’s sister Maggie went there and she said it was cool.  I got into Michigan and I got into Purdue because of my board scores, not my grades.  The other schools were not quite as enthusiastic.  Northwestern was gracious enough to put me on a waiting list but U of M it was. 

The U of M was a new world for me.  I didn’t know anybody.  Kids came from every walk of life and every part of the country  to congregate there.  I lived in a freshman dorm and everyone started out as strangers.  I felt like I could be anything I wanted to be; that nobody would know my past or my pain.  It was like having a blank on my life, waiting to be written. 

I will never forget the day I first saw Karen Jean Mason.  It was in the seating area of my college dorm’s cafeteria.  It was crowded, with almost every table filled and there she was, the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen in my life, sitting all by herself.  She had dark hair with bangs, dark eyes and her bone structure was perfect.  Although I could only see her from the waist up, what I saw was very appealing.  It didn’t make any sense.  How could this stunning creature not be surrounded by hormone-saturated boys; swarming like gnats in the night?  She was simply too gorgeous for me to approach so I went and sat elsewhere but her presence haunted me the rest of the day.

The next day, it was the same thing.  There she was, sitting all by herself.  It was incomprehensible.  Then it hit me.  If she was too beautiful for me to walk up to and say hello, maybe that’s the way other boys felt as well.  It was like her almost-supernatural beauty actually repelled them.  I made up my mind: she didn’t know I was shy and bruised from being dumped by every girl I’d ever loved.  I could go sit with her, if she’d have me, and she’d never know I lacked the skill and confidence to speak to a pretty girl.  I went over and asked her if she’d mind if I sat with her.  Her face lit up and she indicated it was more than OK.  During the course of our conversation, I came to find out that not only was she beautiful, she was exotic as well.  She had been born in this country but raised all over the world.  Her family currently resided in Paris and that was what she considered home.  She was intelligent, funny and warm.  There was always an undercurrent of sadness in her that I never figured out.  Maybe it was the beauty thing; maybe to her it felt like a curse.  Maybe she felt alienated because her background was so different from her peers.  I’ll never know.

I looked into her eyes but there was no spark, no connection.  I could see we had no future together.  Therefore, she was not a candidate to date but there was nothing wrong with being her friend.  I guess I made the choices necessary to guarantee that future happened, or didn’t happen in this case.

We saw each other quite often over the next year, less so in subsequent years but every time I saw her, the interactions were pleasant.  I was not in love with her but I think I could have loved her, given enough time.  She deserved it, not because of her physical beauty but despite it and I have always wondered what happened to her.  I sure would like to see her one more time.