IT WAS THIRTY YEARS AGO THIS MONTH...

How many of you remember when you were in high school, and fell head over heels over that one girl? And although you may have married months or years afterword, had kids, started a career, and all that stuff, you couldn't get that one girl out of your head from time to time?

I do...soooooo clear. Pasadena, Texas in 1975. Pasadena High School, to be exact.

Martha was a classmate in my junior speech class, and was active in the drama class next door. She actually should not have gone to school there, living in southeast Houston. Her father taught math there, though, and an exception from the residency requirments was apparantly one of the benefits.

For the better part of a year, we spent much of our time together. Listening to Barry Manilow. Enjoying Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet. Talking about attending the University of Houston together.

And then, my family decided one night that things were not going well doing the Urban Cowboy type life (without the mechanical bull), and it was time to move back to Mississippi.

I never saw the "girl of my dreams" since. We traded letters for a time but after a period, I guess that we both realized that the chances of getting together again were extremely light. I know that she's now married with a family of her own in the Texas state capitol.

But three decades later, through everything I've gone through in the meantime, there are times which she returns to my thought.

I am lost

Somewhere inside my own dreams

Afraid of what life really means

Living without your love

From "Living Outside Myself"

Gino Vannelli (1981)