Questions

A friend of mine is forty and finds himself single.  He has been dating on a casual basis and there is one woman he has been seeing.  I asked him how that was going and he told me it had been fine for awhile, but the questions have now started.  I hate it when the questions start.

There are many words that women use to ask these questions, but they can all be reduced to the basic: What do we mean to each other and where is this relationship going?  Questions that guys never ask each other, no matter how long they have been friends.

His lady friend was over watching a movie with him and all was fine until the phone rang.  It was another woman calling.  She asked him who had been calling and he told her “she is just a friend” and it was indeed, just a friend.  The response was “just a friend, like I am just a friend?”  Alas, the question had been asked.  Do all men fear the question or is it the process we fear because we know it is the first of many to come?

I was ten years old.  It was the winter of 1961.  Our back lane, shinny league was in full swing and Nancy, who lived a block over was our star goaltender.  In retrospect, our shinny team was on the cutting edge of being an equal opportunity employer, but that is another story.  Darkness was descending upon the lane which coincided with supper time.  Mom called for us to come in.  I asked if Nancy could join us for supper and my mom phoned Nancy’s mom and all was settled.  Mom pulled out all the stops for us and served wieners and beans with a side of toast.  I was never more proud to be her son.

     After supper, it was time for Nancy to go home and my mom instructed me: “A gentleman always walks a lady home”… so I donned my parka.  As the two of us walked down the back lane to her house, Nancy turned to me and asked “do you like me?”

“Like you?” I responded, “of course I like you!  Why…you are the best goalie our team has ever had.”

She pushed the envelope and asked again.  “No…do you really like me?”

She had me.  I was cornered with a direct question.  A direct question that involved the word really.  Till this day, I have no idea how she knew to ask that question.  I assume she was genetically hard wired to ask, just like I was hard wired to panic.  You have to remember, that until this point in time, all of my relationships with women had been confined to my mother, my sister and my school teachers. I was a virgin in every sense of the word.

So…what did I do?  I punched her on the shoulder and I said “you’re it!”

Nancy stopped in her tracks, looked at me with a degree of sadness that I have never forgotten, shook her head and walked into her house.  For me, it was just the beginning and I was only ten.