Looking up an old love

     He was probably the first guy who broke my heart.

     He came to mind the other day and I looked for him online – not to reconnect, but to see what had become of him, and to learn what might have become of me had we stayed together.

     We met when I was in college and drove a Good Humor ice cream truck during the summer to make money for the fall.

     One day, I stopped for lunch in my truck at a drive-in restaurant and next to me happened to be a good-lucking guy in his Corvette convertible.

     We started talking and I told him his car was beautiful and we ended up exchanging phone numbers.

     I was maybe 19.

     We started dating.

     He lived in Dearborn, in one of those modest, two-story homes you see everywhere in Michigan and his bedroom was on the top floor -- a little room with slanted ceilings -- and I always hoped his parents would never walk up to visit us and discover what we were doing.

     We fell in love. He even introduced his friends to some of my friends and some of them started dating. He took me to the cottage his parents owned on Lake Ontario and introduced me to French fries with vinegar.

     I thought the relationship was really going somewhere. He was a high school teacher and I could see myself becoming a teacher and getting married and living happily ever after.

     And then... he broke up with me.
     I bawled my eyes out. My parents tried to minimize my distress, which only made it worse. I can remember screaming at them, "How would you feel if your spouse left you?" and storming into my room.

     I won't lie to you. It hurt for a long time. Really hurt.

     But then I met someone else, and moved away and traveled the world and the world started to feel bigger and he started to feel smaller.

     When I finally found the person I think is him through an Internet search, I discovered he hadn’t moved very far away from that community in Michigan where he grew up.

     I remember he really loved his junk food and I expect he's probably a little on the chunky side these days.

     And my guess is that, if he and I had stayed together, I'd be living in a modest, two-story house not too far from where I grew up, spending my nights sitting in front of the TV and eating Cheetos and never knowing what else life had to offer.

     From this vantage point, years later, I'm glad things worked out the way they did.