Dear G Number 1

I’ve been meaning to write to you for a very long time. Actually, about twenty years after we rather abruptly stopped going out, I succeeded at tracking you down, meaning to say what I hope will be encapsulated here but stopped short of impulsively driving up to your horse farm, knocking on the door and mewling “Surprise!” since, though a fun idea in snippet form, that action would likely have landed me in the local hoosegau, rightly so.

I feel certain that your memory of me is slight at best. I often think of you, mostly in the context of my regret that I ‘did you wrong.’ It’s trite enough to blame how I handled you on the indiscretions of youth, but it’s bothered me ever since, coupled with the sense that I lost something when I let you go.

By the way, the phrase, “I’m going to let you go” as a typical and overused phone conversation termination ploy irritates the living crap out of me since it implies that the party granting the release is doing so in response to the other’s need to flee, yet that second party could not, since the first party had not heretofore, in that conversation, decided to exercise his exclusive option to free the other caller. To those who you this phrase, I say, “Let me introduce you to Mr. Click.”

First, let me say that you were really cool and cute and I really liked you very much. I’m not sure that we had a whole lot in common then except that we were teenagers and I liked you and you liked me. In light of current boy-girl relationships, I guess I wasn’t all that great. I didn’t take you out much although you did hang out when the band was practicing sometimes, though your Dad didn’t let you come to the city when we played CBGB’s because . . . what was his reason? I forget. Oh, yes – his reason was “No.” As a Dad of my very own teenaged girl, I now understand this completely. Sorry, Mr. C.

Come to think of it, I really liked your Dad. He was feisty and pretty cool. He was a pro photog and drove a cool Swedish sports car, which I remember quite well when he came to retrieve you one weekend aftern noon, none too pleased. I’m still not sure why he was so pissed. Though he was small in stature, much shorter than me, I had no doubt that if I worked him up to the right emotional temperature, he would kick my ass from here to there quite righteously.

Your Mom was very quiet, like you, and you looked like her. You and your sister looked a bit alike, though she was tall and overtly sexy and older, of course. You were a slight bit rebellious – you smoked, wore tight clothes but, I get the sense, totally outrageous behaviour on your part was more akin to ‘aw shucks’ and ‘darn the elders’ rather than stealing your Dad’s car and driving all night to Virginia Beach.

The coolest thing about you, though, was your passion for what you wanted to be when you grew up, so to speak. Your goal was to be a farrier. You were a girl from Brooklyn, and you wanted to learn how to make horseshoes and then, put them on horses. For a living. How cool is that?

You interned at Prospect Park Stables one summer and brought me a cat, an orange tabby who, you had said, fell from the hayloft onto a chestnut mare, spooking the horse out of the barn and into the corral outside, tiny crazed kitty bare-backing it for what he was worth. Apparently, that changed him for good since, as he grew up, he relished attacking me at every opportunity, much like Clousseau’s Cato, with me of course inhabiting the role of Clousseau, though, unlike that fictional detective, not always besting my opponent.

Being a country boy at heart, I imagined how it might be to work a farm together, you shoeing horses and me herding sheep. More than symbolic, I was very interested in the business of raising sheep for wool and you encouraged me by buying me a book on the pragmatics of shepherding. I read it from cover to cover and went so far as to look into New England farmland, where hilly country that was bad for crop farming but good for my fuzzy friends was, at the time, and probably still, cheap and plentiful. It might have happened if I was as mature as you and if I wasn’t hadn’t been lured by my own sense of self-importance, preferring the instant adoration of willingly strangers that I could easily find and quickly lose.

But you stayed focused. You went to college to pursue this ancient art as a profession. I was as surprised as anyone else who may be reading this to know that there was a legitimate university that taught this craft, along with animal husbandry and other skills related to the running of a farm. Though I dumped you after your first year in college, I assume you made it because you are now in the business of breeding and raising a special type of horse. At least, I am guessing your are, based on my Googles of you, though they do date back a bit now. This pleases me to no end.

So, I dumped you. Let’s get back to that for a minute. You’ve no doubt heard the phrase, ‘it’s not you; it’s me’ uttered in the context of a break-up either in real-life or in fiction but, in this case, that was and unfortunately still is, the truth. You were turning into a mature and responsible young woman and I had wrapped myself in a patina of teenage angst, mostly imagined, I have to admit now. You were away at school and I wanted someone that could adore me now, now, now. So, I let you go.

I was a lazy ass. I could have driven up to see you at school even though it was five hours away. We would have had fun, I think. We would have tested being grown-up together, alone in our individual and collective experiences. But, I played with the band most weekends and sometimes weeks in a row, far from home. In the age before cell phones, having a telephone conversation was too much work, since we had to coordinate a time when the dorm phone was free and I was never really home, except to feed the cat and fend off my ape-crazy neighbor.

But how I broke up with you was really low and juvenile. I actually had my “new” girlfriend call you to let you know that I wouldn’t be seeing you any more. This is my shame of shames. I feel so low about this that I believe I should suffer from the guilt of it rather than ask for your forgiveness and even should you grant it, I would not acknowledge it. I’m afraid that being immature