Roses and the Senior Ball

We might have called it a prom.  I don't remember.

Anyway, my friend Diane has opened a Facebook page, "On Becoming an Elder".  So far, my thoughts on the subject have centered on "becoming older" and it's with that in mind that I write this post.

This morning I was pulling aggravating little stalks of long rooted grass from around a miniature rose I planted earlier this summer.  The rose's fragrance is sweet and pleasing, making the tedious weeding more pleasant.

Suddenly, though, the rose's fragrance took me back to my senior year in high school and to our class's senior ball.  My date was a lovely, very attractive girl who was as nice of a girl as I had ever known.

I bought her a rose corsage for the senior ball, and all through the night as we went to dinner at Mr. Duff's, danced close to each other and held each other after fast dances, and as we brought the evening to a close when I drove her home, the fragrance of that rose sweetened everything we did.

I'd been "going steady" with this girl for several months and felt very fortunate that such a beautiful and kind girl wanted to be with me.

But, there was something wrong inside of me.  To this day, I don't know what it was, and sometimes the dark feeling crops up again.  This something wrong moved me to push this girl away, to begin to distance myself from her, almost against my will. 

Within a couple of months, this something dark in me won out and I ended our romance and she was heartbroken.

When I was young, I thought events like this in my life would pass.  I remember thinking, whether it was about this stupid break-up (I was stupid) or other things that happened, that surely by the time I was, say, sixty years old, these parts of my life would dissolve into oblivion, be forgotten, and, I thought, as I aged, I wouldn't be troubled by regret and, so I thought, other kinds of feelings I had when young like jealousy or lack of confidence or even something as strong as self-loathing would also disappear.

I thought these were the feelings and experience of youth.

So, this morning, I'm pulling that grass out of the rose bed, and the fragrance brings back the senior ball and how clumsy and thoughtless I was in ending this romance a short time after this ball  and how much I came to hate myself for causing such a lovely and kind girlfriend pain and for pushing such a good person out of my life (although we did go out a few times during my first year of college).  

And that darkness, that something that was wrong when I was eighteen came back, and with each weed I pulled I tried to figure out what that tide of feeling was that turned inside of me. 

I still don't know.

But as I grow older, these memories and the feelings that accompany them do not go away. 

I don't forget.

Suddenly, it's the spring of 1984.  I was teaching a course at Whitworth College covering George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence. 

In that course, we read Eliot's Mill on the Floss and I've forgotten more about that novel than I remember, but I remember discussing with the members of the seminar how painful it is that we cannot bring endings in our life to closure much of the time.

I didn't want that to be true.

I wanted to believe that closure is always possible.

In 1984, when I was thirty years old, this insight was more of an idea than a truth.

Smelling my miniature rose this morning brought back that seminar and it brought back how a lovely, beautiful, kind girl and I went out one last time forty years ago and we didn't know it was our one last time to see each other.

We never said good-bye. 

There was no closure.

I love the smell of roses and I'm very happy I planted this rose by the driveway.

Its fragrance does, inevitably, stir sharp and deep feelings in me from forty years ago that I once thought would go away.

They don't. 

In fact, they haunt me.