A True Reflection
The last day of February. For some reason, I woke up asking myself if my readers were getting tired of my ‘odes’ to black history month. I didn’t start out to do that when I wrote about Seneca Village 5 blogs ago, but there was so much information I wanted to share: When I realized it was Black History Month I thought, OK I’ll go with it, although it should be all year round just like donating to those is need only at Christmas.
As I woke up, my mind wandered. To Ronnie Lyles. I have no idea why,
1970: Junior year. I was cruising with my buds on a Friday night. We ended up where most Shaker Heights High students did—in a spot at the Manner’s Big Boy drive-in. We ordered.
I must have been the driver because soon after I rolled down the car window, Ronnie appeared. I didn’t know how he knew of me but I was honored. Athlete and scholar. Intelligent green-brown eyes. Warm coffee au lait skin. Heading to Stanford in August, on a baseball scholarship. His voice was calm, soothing, sexy. We chatted until our food arrived. I knew, strongly, he would find me at school.
And he did.
When I informed my folks that we were going to go out, they forbid it. I was stunned. Hadn’t we moved to Shaker from University Heights because of religious discrimination against Christians in the neighborhood? When my best friend told me to “hold my nose, he’s a Catholic,” on our way to school, my parents were outraged. Soon after, my sister was born and we moved, only a few miles but a world away.
My parents were wrong. So I sneaked. Timothy Karloff, another Shaker scholar and athletic phenom—heading to Yale—would pick me up and carry me to Ronnie’s car. Sometimes we explored . . . the Metro parks were our favorites.
I sipped my first wine, straight out of the bottle, with Ronnie at the top of a wooded North Chagrin Metroparks ravine—
MD 2020! (yuck) We saw Woodstock together at a local theatre. He inhaled from a water bong throughout. I was scared shitless; it would be years before my first toke.
We also spent considerable time making out in his chilly basement. He sweetly suggested I ‘give up my angel wings,’ as he called it, but I wasn’t ready, so I stuck to my (angelic) guns. But damn he was beautiful, lying there on a rug on his basement floor. Purple Haze indeed.
I’ll never forget the look of disgust from my French teacher, ugly, turtle-faced Miss Stiegel. She actually asked to talk to me in the hall outside her classroom: Vous rendez-vous compte de la position dans laquelle vous vous mettez? she inquired. (Do you realize the position you are putting yourself in?) I was (hypocritically) raised to be non-biased. I didn’t understand the backlash. We were spit on once waiting for a traffic light to change to green. It was all a stunner.
Finally, that summer, my father, a known legal scholar, was asked to speak at a Bar Association conference at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. What a blast.
There, I came to the conclusion that peace was preferable to protest. When we returned I broke it off. And not very sensitively. Ronnie took it hard. It was only this year that I was able to apologize to him for my cavalier behavior, after running into him on FB.
And he’s still beautiful.
