The Chicory Years

The first boy who ever gave me a flower picked it from the edge of a graveled, dead-end road. In a single, fluid motion, he snapped it from the long stem and handed it to me, our fingers touching as it passed from his hand to mine. It was August and the electric blue chicory petals were cool and vibrant against the tan, sun-scorched grasses that were overtaking the seldom-traveled road that led back to an abandoned sandstone brick house. I was a month short of sixteen, and I was smitten.

I had met him a month earlier at a cousin’s wedding reception in Ohio. The Knights of Columbus hall was sweltering and the Michigan cousins that I had traveled to Ohio with were as disappointed as I was in the lack of interesting guys our age lined up for the buffet. We walked outside in our best dresses, scanning the parking lot in hopes that a few latecomers might show up so we would have someone to dance with later. The chain link fence that surrounded the parking lot made our circumstances seem even more dismal. The air was thick with humidity and the sun was still clinging to the western horizon outside the fence. It was going to be a long, miserable evening.

We walked back into the hall and my eyes landed on him immediately. He was leaning against the block wall between the men’s and women’s bathroom doors, watching us as we walked into the hall. Lacking experience in the subtleties of acting normal, I turned and walked in the opposite direction, destination unclear. He had probably been looking at someone else. In fact I was sure of it. One of my cousins maybe. Certainly not awkward, hayseed me. A few minutes later, overtaken by hormone-fueled curiosity, I headed for the women’s bathroom to see if he was still there. He was. I was too nervous to make eye contact again. If he wasn’t looking at me, I didn’t want to know. I glanced up quickly as I approached the doorway. He was definitely looking at me.

I stayed in the bathroom applying and reapplying my Lip Smackers lip gloss. Eventually, the sounds of polka music began vibrating the walls and I opened the door slowly. He was gone. As I headed back to the table where all of the Michiganders were sitting, one of my older cousins from Ohio grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the stage where the band was warming up for their next set. I was a fairly good singer and he had already asked the band if I could sing a song with them. The drummer suggested a few songs and moments later I had a microphone in my hand, waiting for a nod from the lead guitar player, indicating when to jump in on Don Ho’s beloved song, Tiny Bubbles. The dance floor was filled with couples dancing, and ten feet from the stage, there he was, standing all by himself amid the dance floor traffic, eyes locked on me.

He looked like every poster that was taped to my bedroom walls back home. Randy Mantooth, David Cassidy, John Travolta. I definitely had a type and he was it. I stumbled over the words in several places, but he didn’t seem to notice. As soon as the song was over, he began clapping wildly and whistling. I stepped off the stage and within seconds he was at my side, a Pepsodent smile so bright that I didn’t hear a word he said.

At the end of the night, my cousins and I were invited to an older cousins’ house for coffee and to visit with all of our relatives. My brain was still back at the K of C hall when he walked into my cousin’s dining room and sat down directly across the table from me. Everyone was laughing and reminiscing about our trips back and forth over the years. Neither of us could stop smiling, and we volleyed glances back and forth across the table until the moment when I felt his foot graze the top of mine beneath the table. I jumped, assuming it had been an accident, but I left my foot where it was, just in case. It was not an accident. He was brazen and flirtatious, and I was equal parts exhilarated and petrified. When the evening finally ended, he said he would come see me in Michigan. I left Ohio the next morning certain that he wouldn’t.

A two year, long-distance romance began that summer, one that was filled with letters, cards, phone calls, and visits. On one trip to Ohio with my cousins, we met him and a couple of his friends at the Catholic seminary he’d gone to for high school. My older cousin had gone there, too, and we all walked around the small campus discussing where we could go next. I had never been to a shopping mall, so he suggested the Toledo Mall. Everything about it was worlds away from my small-town life. So many stores in one huge building. I had never seen an escalator, and I didn’t know that there were other places to buy clothes than JCPenney. We looked at the records in one of the music stores, his hand landing on an album with a cover photo of a gorgeous, brown-eyed man that resembled him. He couldn’t believe that I had never heard of Cat Stevens. The way he talked about his music convinced me that I needed to listen to it. His favorite song, he said, was Father and Son. When he picked up a Cat Stevens t-shirt near the checkout and asked me if I wanted it, I couldn’t imagine anything more perfect than the moment I was living in. Our group stepped out of the mall into blinding sunlight. Seconds later his right hand clamped down on my left arm, jerking me backward. I had stepped right into moving traffic without looking left or right.  

I made way too many trips to the mailbox over the next two years, and too many mad dashes for the phone every time it rang. Eventually his letters became less frequent and, during a phone call, he casually mentioned that he’d been going to the roller rink with a friend. A female friend. He told me that she was just a friend, and I believed him until the day my cousin called and told me that she was much more than just a friend.

His last letter arrived a few days later. The ominous red ink on the envelope was reason enough to head for the barn and climb to the top of the hay mow where I could read whatever the letter said in private. The words blurred as my eyes scanned the college-ruled notebook paper. It was true. He was involved with someone else. I climbed back down the ladder and shoved the letter back into the envelope, stuffing it into a shoebox of memorabilia to be cried over until several years later when I decided that the only way out of the brokenness was to light a fire and send all of it up into a fury of smoke and flames. Eradicated forever.

But the following August, the chicory bloomed anyway. It was everywhere, and fifty years later it is still everywhere, filling up the ditch banks with color just as the heat begins taking a toll on everything else. At some point between then and now, that electric blue stopped being the color of unrelenting loss and instead became the color of appreciation for the sweeter parts of something that still feels like a once-in-a-lifetime lightning strike.

Mixed in with the memories of red ink scrawled on notebook paper is the one thing that missed the burning barrel fire entirely. One thing for which I will always be grateful. Having grown up listening to Merle Haggard and Eddy Arnold, it’s doubtful that I would have ever found Cat Stevens’ music on my own. The butter-yellow Cat Stevens t-shirt he bought me at the Toledo Mall was the beginning of listening to music as poetry. I cannot imagine who I would have become without it. It was the first step in a lifelong journey of putting my own heart into words. His lyrics became the thing I would return to again and again whenever I felt unmoored. As my children grew, his music would eventually become the soundtrack of our best days.  

The backroads are filled with those electric blue flowers again. They are everywhere, insisting that I slow down long enough to remember how it felt to be a month short of sixteen. I don’t think there will ever be an August when I am not reminded of those innocent days of firsts, still vivid and bright as cool blue petals against sun-scorched grass. It’s an other-worldly kind of magic that transcends time and defies explanation. As the song goes, it’s a wild world.