SOME THINGS YOU NEVER FORGET, nor would you want to. Growing up is so filled with competing confusions and teenage angst, but your first love ought never be forgotten. Even if it ended painfully, it provided something never again to be experienced: the first rung on the ladder of growing up. And so I have always remembered Wendy, my first love, and the Fifties song that provided the music for it: ‘Dreamy Eyes’ by Johnny Tillotson.
And I see paradise / Within those dreamy eyes.
The rhyme may not be exact but the metaphor was accurate. I was head-over-heels. Whether or not she was, I couldn’t say. But for a few months it was enough to get me to take more showers and stop biting my fingernails. It may not have lasted long, but it provided the impetus I needed to move on from my uncertain fantasies to my more substantial fantasies. I had been Wendyized, and that’s progress of a kind. Now, all these decades later, there’s only one thing that I know for sure: thank goodness I moved on from that!