Not Young, Still Restless Read Free

Canada, he wasn’t about to turn it down, and I wasn’t about to move yet again and spend my senior year in high school surrounded by yet another group of strangers. So I waved good-bye to the last remaining member of my immediate family, spent my senior year living with my friend Faye Krause and her family, graduated from Bakersfield High School in the top third of my class, and never looked back.
    I t probably should have been harder for me than it was to let my father move to Canada without me when, in a way, he was all I had left. But very early in my life, because we never seemed to stop relocating, I developed a very effective defense mechanism for coping with the “saying good-bye” process to keep it from being too painful—I learned to avoid getting all that attached to begin with.
    In the first eighteen years of my life I lived in Taft, Fellows, Pumpkin Center, Pixley, Porterville, Tupman, Panama, Redondo Beach, Bakersfield, and Pasadena, not necessarily in that order. At one point Dad even moved us to a five-acre farm so that Jack, Evelyn, and I could learn to truly appreciate animals and the land. Jack was given a cow named Rose, Evelyn had chickens, and I raised rabbits, with whom I won more than one blue ribbon at the California State Fair, thank you very much.
    I had a special bond with Jack’s cow. Rose had beautiful eyes and was such a calm, gentle, reliable presence that for a few years she was my best friend and closest confidante—I could tell her anything without having to worry about her judging me or betraying my confidence, and she always let me do all the talking.
    When it came to human friends, I gravitated more toward my teachers and other adults than I did toward children my age. Dolls and tea parties with teddy bears and playing dress-up were never my idea of a good time, and when there were no adults around to hang out with, I was lucky enough, for as long as I can remember, to enjoy my own company and not rely on anyone else to make me happy.
    Not for one minute, though, did I let that deprive me of the sweet joy and the heartbreaking anguish of falling in love.
    C harles Clark and I were eleven years old when we met as classmates. He was a gifted athlete and a good student, with a smile that sent a thrill through me from the first moment I saw it, and we were the poster children for every book, song, movie, and poem ever written about first loves. I adored him, and I adored how it felt to love him and be loved by him. In fact, it was Charles who inspired my lifelong belief that those of us whose first loves were significant and lasted awhile spend the rest of our lives trying to re-create that same intensity, that sweet sense of purpose and focus and completeness, that perpetual excitement of always having something to look forward to, because just being together, or talking on the phone, or seeing each other in the hall between classes, felt like special occasions. I’m sure I spent the rest of my love life trying to re-create the “high” of Charles Clark, and at the risk of ruining the suspense, I’ll tell you right now it never happened.
    Charles and I mutually agreed on two conditions when we officially started our relationship. The first was that if either of us found ourselves wanting to be with someone else, we would tell the other immediately. The second was that no matter how tempted we might be, he would respect my insistence on being a virgin when I got married. That wasn’t some hysterical reaction to the two molestation experiences I’d had, or a blind acceptance of one of Mother’s religious rules whether it made sense to me or not. It was my idea, my belief that my virginity was too valuable to forfeit for anything less than a lifelong commitment. Charles, hormones and all, respected that without question or complaint, which, of course, only deepened my faith in him and made me love him more.
    To add to the perfection, our parents approved, so there was no sneaking