Erik Eckel

The class was creative writing. An English major, it was time to begin writing creatively for college credit. Because the course was a workshop, there were only 10 or 12 students, thus the classroom was small and rather intimate.

I was early for the first spring semester class. The weather was cold and crisp, although the sun was out on this bright early January day in 1988.

Still, the classroom, room 109 in the (now Bingham) Humanities Building, featured just a few slim windows through which the sun couldn’t do much to brighten the drab interior. The building itself was constructed in what I would describe as brutalist government style: many relatively unimaginative geometric shapes formed from gray concrete with, to be fair, some occasional brick accents, at least on the outside. Though the interior was a little rough, with pedestrian tile floors and hallways flanked by cheap cinder block walls sloppily painted white, the facility was serviceable and I’d spend several years within the building working toward my degree.

The small classroom’s white textured panels at the rear helped deaden echoes, but the remaining walls were just cold concrete bricks similar to those in the hallways. The ceiling, if anyone bothered actually looking up, revealed the bottom of the poured gray concrete forms that served as the floor for the second story above. Two neglected blackboards went unused at the front, where a simple bare desk provided the professor a work surface.

Maybe a dozen plastic chairs with integrated desk trays served students. These desks, we would learn, would often be arranged in a semi-circle to enable discussing and collaborating on attendees’ various written works. Moving the desks into the semi-circle took but a moment and made the class, and corresponding discussions and debates, more intimate.

Remember, during this time, closeness wasn’t a hallmark of the late 1980s. Ronald Reagan was serving his second term as President. The movie Wall Street, which celebrated a corrupt corporate raider, was among the most popular box office performers, and the Iran-Contra scandal topped headlines.

Nevertheless, I was looking forward to this class and the first opportunity for classmates and a professor to share their thoughts and opinions on my creative work. This was a welcome development for someone who’d landed his first gig writing sports for a small town’s weekly newspaper when he was just thirteen and who now regularly wrote for the college’s student newspaper. Those articles were all non-fiction, as opposed to fiction, which seemed like such a strange beast, at the time.

So, no surprise, I was excited for a change of pace in the middle of a full course load, starting in the cold depths of winter, that also featured History of Civilizations II, Music in Western Civilization and Fundamentals of American Government. I took a seat against the far wall and was just killing the last few minutes until the class started when in walked a brunette. Sporting the classic late ‘80s permed hairdo popular then, I was instantly struck. She wore a sleeveless ribbed blue top with jeans and I had to force my attention away lest I get caught staring. I remember thinking hmm, here’s an interesting young lady, and feeling strange sensations within my chest.

The professor arrived a moment later. The process of passing out the printed syllabus and introducing ourselves began shortly thereafter. That’s when I heard the brunette’s soft and airy voice for the first time.

Already I knew I was in trouble. Previously I’d met hundreds of co-eds in various classes. None had such an effect on me.

The next several weeks I paid close attention to everything she wrote. In one essay she described an aversion to eating pizza. My job at the time was delivering pizza for Domino’s, so I found her objection objectionable. Who doesn’t love pizza in college?

Writing about pizza is also a little ironic. John Cusack’s Gib character, in the Henry Winkler-produced and Rob Reiner-directed 1985 movie The Sure Thing, explains in a paper he writes for his creative writing class how to eat pizza without burning the roof of your mouth. Importantly, it’s also within this same class that he meets his love interest, Alison (played by Daphne Zuniga). The movie has become one of my favorites over the decades, in part because Gib ultimately wins Alison’s love by being himself and despite the fact she’s initially dating someone else.

When the time came to distribute my own work for classmates to read and review, I paid particular attention to this brunette’s reactions. First I watched for facial expressions while she read the piece, then I acted unaffected as she provided feedback, which proved mostly safe and pedestrian, as might be expected from a music major taking the class simply because it helped satisfy other liberal arts credit-hour requirements.

Over time I worked up the nerve to talk with her, one day, as we were leaving class. I asked if she was related to an old high school friend of mine, with whom she shared a last name. I’d recently seen the guy on campus and shared pleasantries, and the subject seemed a safe ice breaker. She said she wasn’t, but I’d essentially introduced myself and small talk subsequently became easier. In time I’d walk with her out of the building until our paths diverged. Then, the walks became a little longer. Just as that became an encouraging development, I walked her straight to her boyfriend’s car, in which he sat waiting to pick her up. I shrugged it off. If memory serves, he drove an unremarkable Ford Mustang. His ride may even have been the six-cylinder version, not the five-liter eight-cylinder GT, which predisposed me to think of him as a poser. But I will admit as to possessing some bias.

Regardless, I was undeterred. Shortly before the class was due to end in late April, I asked her out. To my delight she said yes. I was overjoyed.

Now, as a pizza delivery driver, getting a weekend evening off was difficult and bit into your weekly earnings. But here was a young woman with whom I was quite smitten, so I didn’t care. I navigated all the machinations necessary to secure the evening off.

Certainly, I was walking with an extra spring in my step while I plotted a romantic dinner at a riverside restaurant. I also began scoping new movies to find a flick worthy of a first date with this young lady with whom I’d been working so hard for several months to build a relationship.

The night before we were supposed to go out I was outside detailing my car. No way was I going to escort this brunette in a dirty car. No, that wasn’t going to happen. But my mom shouted to me from the door saying there was a young woman on the phone. My heart dropped when I picked up the handset and heard her voice. She was canceling, she said, because her boyfriend didn’t want her going out with another guy.

My mind slipped straight into panic mode, amygdala fully hijacked, trying to function effectively even though it seemed like the world was melting. I think I said something to the effect of I could have told her that, but if something should change, I’d welcome hearing from her again, and we left it at that.

I was devastated. My mother, having overheard my side of the conversation, tried consoling her sensitive son as I grabbed my wallet and keys. A drive, I knew, was going to prove necessary to process the news and wrap my head around the fact this young woman, for whom I felt an overwhelming affection, had just killed whatever relationship I’d worked all semester to develop. I remember removing the sunroof, stopping for a pair of forties and heading to a rural park with a large lake just outside the city.

Once there, I killed both beers in just a few minutes. I spent the next couple hours appreciating the medicated buzz, listening to dramatic music, staring at the moonlight reflecting off the lake and weighing whether all the struggles and pain of modern life were remotely worth the effort. I felt so alone. I remember praying or meditating, whatever you want to call it, that somehow this brunette wasn’t out of my life forever and hoping that, someday, maybe our paths would cross again.

You buck up. What’s the alternative?

I resolved to assure her it was OK she’d canceled our date and suggest maybe we could get coffee one day or somehow keep in touch. But she didn’t show up for the final class, nor did she arrive to take the final exam. I decided she was just too embarrassed to face me and, for some stupid reason, felt guilty for making her feel that way.

I was also hurt and angry. Make no mistake. The feelings of loss and sadness, mixed with a little desperation, were quite unpleasant. I felt as if everything in my life was on the line and I blew it. And I understand anyone at the time would have told me I was overreacting, that I didn’t really even know this woman, that I had a crush and needed to get over it.

Time would prove them wrong.

A few weeks later she’d call me at Domino’s, ostensibly seeking a pizza delivery even though she was more than nine miles away clear across town, well outside our delivery area. Immediately I caught on to her ruse and asked how her boyfriend was. She said they’d broken up, and I told her the polite thing, that I was sorry to hear that, but in my next sentence I asked her out, again. She said yes, and we made plans for the coming weekend when I would learn the reason she hadn’t finished that class or followed up with me sooner was she became so sick she was hospitalized, then needed to heal and get back on her feet.

There’s a lesson there, somewhere.

I’ll spare you details, but rest assured we were soon a committed couple. Together we navigated the challenges and pressures of building professional careers, purchasing a house, managing inevitable tears and disappointments, making mortgage payments, battling illnesses, beginning a family, having two children, converting to a household with a stay-at-home mom and ultimately becoming caregivers to our own parents.

But something equally special still lay in store.

Our daughter would meet a young man and they would become an item of their own shortly before she graduated magna cum laude with two degrees from the same University of Louisville. Following his naval service, they would return from overseas to Louisville, where they both would chase master’s degrees and, for him, entrance into the university’s Ph.D. program.

They’d ask that brunette, now my wife of 35 years, and me to meet them on campus. They wanted to give us a tour of their workspaces and for us to meet one of their directors. Witnessing the many and significant changes, including pristine new athletic fields, landscaped avenues and gorgeous bright and airy new buildings, was a strange sensation. But while walking the once-familiar campus, we took a quick side trip to the Humanities building. Although the entire structure was being renovated, we were able to visit classroom 109. Walking through the doorway, I felt butterflies, and my pulse was racing. I sat right in the seat where I’d been sitting when that brunette first walked through that exact doorway, right into my life, decades ago.

My daughter, emotional like myself, immediately sensed the mood shift. She became quiet and surreptitiously began snapping photos while her husband looked on. Not wanting to let anyone down, I said I still vividly remembered how my now-bride looked almost 40 years ago when she crossed that very same threshold looking for a vacant desk. What went untold is how, 38 years ago almost to the day we were revisiting that classroom, I was caught in that agitated state of tortured purgatory wondering where she was and trying to understand why she’d disappeared so abruptly.

But then she said something profound, expanding on the story for our son-in-law; had we not met in that classroom and both proven diligent pursuing our relationship, our daughter wouldn’t have been born. Meaning, he wouldn’t have met our daughter, so they couldn’t have gotten married, and he, subsequently, likely wouldn’t be here working as a teaching assistant and progressing toward his Ph.D.

See? Everything was on the line.

My soul knows what it knows, just as does yours, too. So, when people tell you something that rubs the fur of your soul’s spirit the wrong way, take a beat then tell them they don’t know what they’re talking about. You got this; you can do it. We did.