A Girl I Can't Forget

     Not everyone is found or findable on Facebook.  Not even Google can produce the goods on all who are or were in our lives.  Who hasn't dithered with searches that were fruitless and been puzzled that a trail can go cold.  I have not been able to locate the second smartest person I ever met; one of the groomsmen at my wedding; a colleague from my Great Books days who was one of the best on-her-feet-presenters in front of a group you could imagine; and a recent teaching colleague who said repeatedly before he retired that "we'll stay in touch, we'll have coffee."  Yeah, right.
     I have reason to believe that all of these folks are alive and well.  They just do not want to be found (and not only by me; others who have looked have also come up empty.)  I have to admire their ability to cloak and cloister themselves, apparently without the resources of the witness protection program.  Perhaps part of the answer to the puzzle is in the thought I expressed last year to my siblings when we were discussing how well or how little we knew our deceased sister.  "I think each of us got to know her as much as she wanted us to." 
     There is a force, however, that retrieves the traces of faded friends, be they living or dead.  Memory.  No computer needed.  Memory creates the pull of the past and and makes possible the backward reach that lifts others into the now.  All of this was focused for me when I came upon a  quiet and modest piece I wrote in my "salad days" ("when I was green in judgement," Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra).  I published it in the college literary magazine I edited. Here it is, unchanged from that time.

          "And your prayers are requested for the repose of the soul of Miss Donna Hoffman,
          who was killed last night in a traffic accident.  The Rosary will be held . . . "
          
          And that was how I heard of it, quietly and simply, in church, announced from the
          pulpit by the sympathetic voice of the priest.  I remember feeling surprised, and a
          little lump forming at the bottom of my stomach, and a vague fright spreading
          through me like a rush of cold air. 

          We had gone to grade school together and had a crush on each other then.  She
          was thin and wiry with a square face and her eyes were always bright blue with
          defiance.  We were often sarcastic with one another as was the code of our
          adolescence, but we laughed a lot, mostly at our classmates and seldom at our-
          selves.  She would call me up on the phone and we would talk for an awfully long
          time, and I remember little things--like how you could hang up and not break the
          connection if the other person held the receiver, and I remember her telling me
          about some guy she went tobogganing with. 

          She was quick and intelligent and I remember a cute little essay she wrote once
          about a penny and a dollar and I thought it was terribly original until a few years
          later when I read the story somewhere else and had a good laugh, remembering
          her version.

          The nun who taught us once remarked that she was the only girl in the class who
          had a "natural beauty" and I readily agreed because that phrase set her apart and
          somehow explained the electric feeling I got one day when she bumped into me in
          the aisle and her hand brushed my leg. 

          But then we left and went to different schools and lost contact and it wasn't until
          college that I remembered seeing her again and then it was only casually, socially,
          little more than "hello" and "goodbye."  I do remember seeing her one night walking
          by the dorms with a guy, holding hands, and she looked up and said, "Hello, Mike"
          and the light caught her face and there was something different there, something
          gone.

          Then later, at a big dance, some of the fraternity men got to fooling around with the
          microphone between numbers and a deep experienced voice announced her name
          and wished her happy birthday and I knew then that she had "arrived" in the social
          circle and was beyond reach forever.  Not long before her death I was talking with
          a friend of mine who knew her also and he showed me a picture he had of her. He
          began to talk of how she was "messed up" psychologically, and he started to tell a
          lot of wild stories he had heard . . . but I closed my ears to his voice because that
          was not the girl I knew, not the girl I remembered.

          I am looking now at the picture he had, and it is really not a very good one for she
          was much prettier than she is shown here.  She looks a little scared, timid almost
          but if you look closely you can see the bright look defiance in her eyes which the
          thing I remember most. 

          And I'm really not sure why I wrote this; it's a strange kind of obituary you'll agree,
          but at least it gives form to a memory if nothing else. And though her death really
          was a terrible thing it would be infinitely worse to erase the thought of it and com-
          fortably forget about her.  I am grateful for the brief childhood friendship we had
          and for the vivid memory of her which lingers in my mind . . . the bright blue look
          of defiance.