Forty-four years seemed to pass in the blink of an eye

November 25th, 1967. September 12th, 1992. February 12th, 1980. September 29th, 1973.

I have a really strange memory. Half the time when I leave the house to do an errand, I forget something I meant to take with me. But if I hear a song from the '60s or the first half of the '70s, it's probably 10-1 that I'll be able to identify the performer and the title before the words actually start.

Weird.

I can remember the lyrics to the theme songs of most of the TV shows I watched as a kid, but I have to look up the birthdays of my son-in-law and daughter-in-law or I'll forget them.

The four dates above were all significant ones in my life, although to be fair, I had to look the first one up. I remembered it only as the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Those dates signify the beginning of four of the five most significant dating relationships of my life. Two of the four ended in marriage, one of those in divorce.  A third was someone I almost married, and the fourth -- the oldest one -- was the first time I dated someone long enough to think I was in love.

Ah, seventeen.

There's a fifth date I didn't include in the list. I wanted to put it out there my itself because it's the story I want to tell you today.

December 13th/14th, 1969.

I'm not sure I ever had a year with more ups and downs than 1969. I washed out at one school early in the year and was at another one in the fall. I got noticed one afternoon starring in a pickup football game on campus and got myself invited to a rush function at the jock fraternity. I went to one function and they invited me to pledge.

Pledging in 1969

That was the time in my life I was totally incapable of balancing the different parts of my life. I had been a classic social misfit for most of my first 19 years, but in the year of Woodstock, all of a sudden I seemed to be popular. I even seemed to enjoy some modest dating success. Of course, I got so wrapped up in the fun I was having that I forgot I needed to study for my classes.

I was already about two-thirds of the way down the slippery academic slope by the beginning of December, and when they held the first draft lottery of the Vietnam era on Dec. 1st, I could have been in big trouble except for one thing. When I was not enrolled in school the previous spring, I had been called by the Selective Service to report for a draft physical.

Thanks to a really good letter from a doctor and a childhood illness that I was on the verge of outgrowing, I had been classified 1-Y, which meant that in the event of war, I was a hostage.

Thank you, Woody Allen.

Actually, it meant "draftable only in case of declared war or national emergency." Nixon's dominoes didn't qualify, which was good since my number was 39.

Things got even more weird the next week. Saturday the 13th was the fraternity Christmas party, and for some reason I can't remember, my date fell through at the last minute. My big brother in the fraternity had been trying to fix me up with his girlfriend's roommate Shelley. She had come to one of our fraternity football games and had reportedly thought I was "cute."

I told Jim this might be a good time for that fix-up, but he said he had already gotten a date for her with one of the other pledges. My only hope for a date on such short notice, he said, was another friend of his girlfriend. This girl was really nice and had a good personality.

Uh oh.

There was, as you might guess, just one problem, and there's no way to tell you what it was without sounding like a jerk. She had a cleft palate, what people back then generally called a harelip.

GWU, 1969

Hey, I was not the most enlightened 20-year-old in the world.

It was suggested that Shelley and I could find a way to be together at some point during the evening, which sounded like a great idea. All I had to do was crap all over the poor girl with the cleft palate and also steal a date from one of my pledge brothers.

I obviously wasn't the smartest 20-year-old either.

So the tough part of the evening was Dec. 13th and the good part was Dec. 14th.

In the end, the fraternity decided someone who would do that to one of his brothers might not be such a good member. I received a severe warning, which didn't matter anyway because I went the rest of the way down that slippery slope and found myself out of school again.

You could say the rest of it didn't work out either, since Shelley and I never got married, but that's sort of like saying all the teams that didn't win the World Series had bad seasons. There's success and then there's success.

We were together for six months, the first important relationship of adult life for both of us. And if I went into a tailspin for awhile after we broke up, it wasn't her fault. The fact is, every significant relationship in our lives builds on the foundation of the ones that went before.

It's strange for me to think that all that started 44 years ago. I'm 64, not 20, and she just celebrated her 31st birthday for the second time (do the math). She's successful and important, while I'm retired and mostly happy.

I've seen her once since 1970, a two-minute encounter at the Democratic Convention in 2000 in Los Angeles. We both looked a lot different. She looked better.

The world has changed so much. Forty years ago, when people broke up and went their separate ways, it was rare that either learned how things worked out for the other one. These days, with Facebook and all sorts of other social media, we find ourselves connected to people we never thought we would ever see again.

It's nice. It's like walking out of a movie halfway through and finding out years later how it ended.

***

My baseball collection keeps growing, and I have had the opportunity to pick up some unusual ones.

The real challenge is to find signatures of older players at good prices, and old signatures are the best. Most of the older players I've managed to acquire signed the balls at autograph shows as older men. One ball I landed recently was my first from a player whose career started in the 1920s. Bill Terry started with the New York Giants in 1923, and in 1930 he became the last National Leaguer to hit .400.

Gates Brown

One that meant more to me, though, was finding a ball signed by Gates Brown.

Brown is best known as the most successful pinch-hitter in American League history. His entire career was spent with the Detroit Tigers, and he was part of their World Series-winning team in 1968.

But what he meant to me was that he was the only major league ballplayer from Crestline, Ohio, the little town where my grandparents lived. As a young boy, Brown had earned money shining shoes, and he often came into the police station where my grandfather was chief and shined his shoes.

My grandfather was so proud of him, and when he introduced me to him before a game at Cleveland's Municipal Stadium, I remember Brown saying, "Hi, Chief. How have you been?"

My grandfather died in 1985, and I hadn't thought about Brown in many years. He died three months ago in Detroit at the age of 74. He had lived his entire life there after baseball, but I was pleased to see that he was buried back in Crestline, the town where he grew up.