Musings of a Restless Mind

Sharon and I met in a creative writing class our senior year in college. She told me later that her academic adviser had looked at her askance when he signed off on her choice, but she had never given up on wanting to write, even if she made her living as a Chemist. She came into the room bantering with two of her girlfriends, and my first impression was, “She’s cute, but we’ll never get along.” I’ve joked with her for years that I’ve never changed my mind. A quarter lasted only 10 weeks, and I mostly ignored the overly academic reading list. She was always more disciplined and read the books, but we both turned in 6 or 7 stories during those 10 weeks, being among the most productive in the class. She wrote modern mystery/horror stories along the lines of the old Alfred Hitchcock television show. I wrote science fiction. She asked me why I didn’t try writing a mystery story, and I asked her why she didn’t try an SF story. She came back with a poetic modern fantasy story about twilight and a mysterious stranger. I wrote a hard-boiled detective pastiche and cribbed the opening from my impression of our first meeting. I modeled the detective’s client after her, giving her the same initials and making her a chemist, and wrote, “She swooped into my office like a lighted stick of TNT rolling towards a munitions depot. This dame had handle with care written all over her.”

I realized I wasn’t likely to see her after that quarter, and I was too shy to ask her out in front of her friends, so I stalked her. I located her apartment a few blocks from mine. It was on the second floor in the corner farthest from the elevator, so early one evening I showed up at her door, and when she answered, I asked, “Would you believe I got a flat tire in your parking lot, and this was the first door I came to?” She replied, “No. Would you like to come in?” That turned into our chaotic first “date”. She, I, and her best friend picked up my roommate, and we went to an Indian restaurant where we pooled our money and asked them to give us something we could eat for that, followed by the on campus screening of some cartoons highlighted by Bambi Meets Godzilla.

We also used to run into each other on campus at lunch. She would always attract a crowd at her table, and her best friend once commented after she had left, “You know, when either you or Sharon are here, people can have a normal conversation, but when you’re both here together, something happens, and the conversation goes out of control.” That was us.

It was not to be however, because there were wounds we didn’t know about each other. She took Karate from her freshman year to learn how to defend herself, and her first trip home, her father, who was six foot four and built like the offensive lineman and wrestler he had been in high school, grabbed her from behind and said, “What would you do to someone who did this?” to test her. She had no answer, but when he tried it again the next time she was home, she became very still and cold, and said, “What I would do, I wouldn’t do to my own father.” He let go of her as quickly as he had ever done anything in his life.

Her boyfriends until then had been only as tall or shorter than her own five foot ten, and I was someone who at 6’2”, physically at least, reminded her of her father. On my part, my first romantic relationship had ended shortly before I met her. We had gone back and forth on who was in love with who, but were never in the same place at the same time, and a young man showed up who was immediately wildly devoted to her, so we went our separate ways. When I found myself falling in love with Sharon, I told myself I was a hopeless idiot who thought he was in love again with only the second girl I had ever gone out with. When I saw her with another boyfriend on campus, I was convinced that I was going to lose her although we had never said anything to each other about being exclusive or even serious. I got drunk and called her at midnight one night, and that cemented her idea of my being dangerous like her father, and pushed me into the friend zone.

When she ended up at grad school at UCSD, I tried to continue the relationship while I fruitlessly pursued the fame and glory of a freelance writer, while eking out a subsistence living with manual labor. I found I couldn’t stand being friends with someone I was hopelessly in love with, and eventually disappeared from her life. She later told me that she had started to see us as a romantic couple again when I disappeared, but she didn’t try to pursue me if I felt I had to disappear. How we got back together is another typically magical story that never happens to anyone else, but this is already too long so that’s for part 2.

Sharon and Frank, Together at Last (5 years Later)

When I left off, I had disappeared from Sharon’s life while she was pursuing her PhD in Chemistry at UC San Diego, and I was futilely trying to make a career as a fiction writer while scraping out a living as a day laborer. I had disappeared because I couldn’t stand to be just a friend with someone I was hopelessly in love with. Now, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story.

Sharon had come down with mononucleosis and had to drop out of school for a time to recover. When she felt well enough, she had taken a job at a hole-in-the-wall lab where she had a few interesting adventures including analyzing chicken shit. She loved to say she once literally had a chicken shit job. Finally she had gotten back to school and back on track to get first her Masters, and then her PhD. Some 5 years after my disappearance, she was now studying hard for her oral exams, or quals as they called them, to be advanced to candidacy for her PhD.

Meanwhile I kept submitting stories and, in my spare time, I had a hobby. There is a free, weekly paper in San Diego called The Reader. They accepted free personal ads of 25 words or less, and in the late 70s some of us played with them, as if they were a prototype version of Twitter. I liked to submit humorous personals. One of my favorites was:

SEVEN MELLOW, vegetarian, non-smoking dwarves seek young woman to do light housework, reply Sneezy

A friend who I was planning to go with to a science fiction convention in LA knew I did this, and, when his car died and he couldn’t go, instead of calling me, as any sensible person would, he put a personal ad in the Reader, reading:

FRANK HOOD. My car caught fire I can’t make the Con

I was rather appalled to see my full name in the Reader personals, but shrugged it off as odd but probably harmless.

Meanwhile Sharon was studying like crazy, and, to rest her brain, she read stories from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. One happened to mention General Hood from the Civil War. Also to take a break, she took to reading the Reader’s personal ads, where my name popped out at her. OK, that’s two, she thought, and to keep God from bothering her further about me, she sent in her own personal ad, and then forgot about it:

FRANK HOOD if you’re the writer with the baseball cap and sunglasses, I’m a lighted stick of TNT rolling towards a munitions depot

I wore a baseball cap in college to keep my unruly long hair from getting in my eyes. I liked the cap because it had attached sunglasses that I could flip down rather than have to carry sunglasses in my pocket. Needless to say, I knew immediately who had sent the ad, and I was floored. Of course, it didn’t have a way to contact her, or even say to contact her. It was past the deadline for getting a reply in for the next week, but I had always thought Sharon would be somewhere else with her PhD by now. So, since she was still in San Diego, I looked for her name in the phone book. (Yes, it was the 70’s. We still had phone books.) She was listed, so I called the number. A man answered and I apologized saying, “I must have the wrong number. I was looking for Sharon Gaffney.”

He replied, “She doesn’t live here anymore. Can I take a message?”

That reply surprised me, and I said, “Well, I don’t know what message to leave.”

He followed with, “Who is this?”

I answered, “You wouldn’t know me, my name is Frank Hood.”

His reply was, “Oh yes, she’s talked about you. This is her husband.”

That took me a long second to digest. Of course he neglected to say that their divorce would be final in another month, but I sort of got that from, “She doesn’t live here anymore.”

At that point I wasn’t to be denied of course, so I went to UCSD, found the Chemistry building, and tracked down her lab. The lab was locked, so I left a note saying, “Does the word ‘Chiquita’ mean anything to you? If so, call 555-1234 (or whatever my number was then). “Chiquita” was the last word scrawled by a dying man in my story, and the clue that led to the solution of the mystery. The plot of my story had to do with chimps being trained using by my client’s kidnapped father and her own chemical formula to make them intelligent enough to type out thrillers for Random House publishing, and, of course, the trail of Chiquita banana shipments led to the villain’s warehouse. Her lab partner saw the note first, recognized that it wasn’t for him, and gave it to Sharon. She called, and we immediately went back to the magical storybook journey we had always been on.

Now you know the rest of the story.