Fifteen Minutes

Recently, a friend of mine, for some strange reason, asked me to list the ten times in my life that I would like to go back and relive for fifteen minutes. Not to change, as we all know what happens when we accidentally change the space-time continuum. Just to relive the moment and the emotion.

Always up for a little mental exercise, I thought about it for a few days and, on my lunch hour one day, listed them out, in no particular order.

1) The moment my son was born in 2011;

2) The moment I met my wife (a love-at-first-sight sort of thing);

3) The moment I said "I Do;"

4) The moment we buried my stillborn son in 2003. (Because that's the sort of pain that, although always there, you eventually get used to. Sometimes I don't want to be used to it. Sometimes I want it to make me cry again.);

5) The moment that the doctor came out to the waiting room and told me that, after six hours of emergency surgery, my wife would fully recover;

6) In 1996, when I was 21, I took my first cross-country vacation by myself to San Francisco, which has since become my favorite city (as conservative as I am...). I haven't been able to choose a particular "fifteen minutes" of that trip but if I had to it would probably be standing on the end of pier 39 on a foggy night;

7) One of the wacky, fun, (and probably illegal) stunts I pulled with my best friend Kevin back when we were teenagers;

I could only write down seven of them. There were three more that popped into my head, three that I tried to replace with other moments in my life but I couldn't. They were three of the defining moments of my life that occurred in 1991, just before I turned 16. And they were all with the same person.

I'm going to call her Sophie. Which is unfortunate. Not because it's not a nice name -- it's very nice. But I don't want to list her real name here. And that's the unfortunate thing because she had the most beautiful name in the world. Not absolutely uncommon, and, if you want a hint, it's the full first name of a famous Jewish girl that wrote a famous diary during World War II. You may go and find it, but please do not post it in any comments, because if you Google the name, the specific woman that I'm writing this story about shows up in the first fifty results... and if she ever Google's her own name (like we all are guilty of), this story might pop up and I really don't want her to read about herself here. She may find it creepy. But, to me, it is the most beautiful name I have ever heard. The only reason I would never give the name to my daughter, if I ever have one, would be out of respect for my wife.

Anyway, I digress. Let's settle on Sophie. Which was her chosen name in my sophomore year French class anyway (Mine was Jean Luc, by the way... Only because I was a Star Trek fan). That class is where we begin with:

8) The first time I saw Sophie.

It was just after Christmas break, and we had all returned to school to start the second semester. I was in my least favorite class, French. I hated it, I was not good at it, and this was the last semester I would ever need to take a foreign language. The only good thing about it was it was the last period of the day.

So, on the first day of the new semester, SHE walks in. The most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Sure, she was probably more extremely cute than beautiful, whatever that means, but the point stands, it was love at first sight.

The teacher introduced her to the class and asked her to say a few words about herself. Like a tape recorder, I remember every word that she said. Now the particular things that she said here are not important to this story for two reasons. Number one, the situation that put her into my high school for the semester is unique enough that some reader here may someday recognize it and put two-and-two together. The other reason is that, although I listened intently, it wasn't the words that matter here. It was the way she said them.

It was a beautiful, perfect Australian accent. With perfect diction.

Yes, dear reader, I believe I drooled. That moment, I decided that I love Australian accents. In fact, it was because of this girl that, 21 years later, my Garmin GPS unit is programmed with an Australian voice. But I'm getting WAY ahead of myself here.

I was fifteen. I was going through puberty. I had developed crushes on anything female that breathed. Certain parts of me were waking up.

But THIS exotic girl. Oh my God. My heart started racing.

OK, your author has now come back to Earth. Anyway, as I was saying, I fell in love at first sight. She had these beautiful eyes. And this voice that put singing angels to shame. I needed to talk to her.

So, that very day, being the incredibly shy boy that I was, and physically unable to talk to beautiful women, walked up to her after class.

She smiled at me.

She was the epitome of shyness. She looked down at the ground when she smiled. I believe that the word for her would be "demure."

Surprisingly, I was able to talk to her. She naturally put me at ease. She became one of my best friends.

Which brings me to:

9) Walking Sophie home from school.

I'm going to be honest here. I asked her out. She told me that she wasn't allowed to date. Which broke my heart. But seriously, I was fifteen and I couldn't drive. What could have date could I have taken her on anyway?

But the excuse about not being allowed to date. I believed her. Before and since, I have heard every excuse for a girl to use to say "no" to me -- I've actually gotten the "washing my hair" excuse. I saw through every one of those excuses. But to this day, I believe that Sophie was telling the truth and up until that point in my life, that was the closest I had ever gotten to a "yes."

However, she did tell me that I could walk her home from school. And we walked together many times that semester. I learned a lot about her country, and she gradually came out of her shell and told me more about her life too.

But it didn't take long for June to arrive. Which brings me to the final item on my list.

10) The last moment I ever saw her.

The last day of school she signed my yearbook and gave me her address in Australia. I knew I would miss her. I wrote to her and she would write back. We'd send each other pictures. I loved hearing from her. I loved writing to her. And, I discovered that I loved her.

Up until that point, it was just a crush. The "love" at first sight bit above deserved a pair of quotation marks. It was the deepest crush I have ever had, up to the point I met my wife in late 1992. Sophie was the one that got away. It was Sophie's absence, and the incredible emptiness that I felt when she left, that made me understand that she was the first girl I had ever loved.

It's 21 years later. I'm happily married to a wonderful wife. We have a great little son. We have been through thick and thin and I wouldn't trade a day of it. But you never forget your first love.

I've always wondered a few things. They don't matter anymore and I will never know the answers, even though we are still friendly with each other and still email each other once in a while. But I still wonder: Did she feel the same way toward me as I felt toward her? Did she miss me as much as I missed her?

And most importantly, though doubtfully: Does she know how much she meant to me and how much she helped to define my life?

Again, the answer doesn't matter. I would never leave my wife for anyone -- of all my friends, I consider myself the luckiest, having been with my wife for 13 great years. But, every so often, I think back -- and while I no longer feel the love in a romantic sort of way, I still feel the pain in a romantic sort of way. And in a way, I will always love Sophie -- for being my friend in that stage of my life.

EPILOGUE

After my friend posited the "fifteen minute" questions to me, I countered with another philosophical question. One that popped into my mind after I pondered the last three of my answers.

"How would your life be different if we had all of our modern technology twenty years sooner."

Let's put forward that question for a moment... What if, in 1991, we had Skype and video chat and smartphones?

What if, when Sophie went home to Australia, international calls didn't cost an arm and a leg? What if I could text message her whenever? What if we could have video-chatted?

I'm not going to go so far as to say that Sophie and I would have ended up together. The likelihood of that actually happening, even with all of the technology that we have today, would still be slim -- long distance relationships and all. But... I met my wife in 1992 -- a mere fifteen months from when Sophie went back home. Meeting my wife was love at first sight as well... but it would be another eleven months before we would have our first date. What would have happened if I was still smitten with Sophie then? Would I have even noticed the woman whom I would eventually marry? It's entirely possible that I would be with neither Sophie nor my wife now.

Another unique personal observation -- although I still (and will always) love Sophie deeply, I would never enter into an affair with her. Not for the main reason -- I love my wife and she's the only one I've ever been with -- but, I don't -- and have never -- thought of Sophie in a sexual way. Even though I was going through puberty and had lots of girls deposited in what would one day be termed the "Spank Bank," and although she was the most beautiful girl I had seen, I couldn't - and can't - imagine her naked. I'm still trying to figure out what that means.