True first loves never really leave

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

He was my first real love, a flesh-and-blood boy, not a creation, not someone Rosemary and I invented on a Saturday afternoon as we walked downtown, or on a Saturday night as we babysat.

Those heartthrobs - Val Poche and Jimmy Weber - were actual people, but people we didn't know. They were older boys Rosemary saw at church or at school, around whom we invented a life.

"Dear Jimmy, To me you are the dearest most wonderful boy in the world," we wrote in a letter we penned one weekend. We were 12 and consumed with the idea of love. We didn't write letters to send. We wrote for practice, because we wanted to be prepared when the real thing came along.

It came along for me when I was in eighth grade.

"Billy Ahlgren said this." "Billy Ahlgren said that." "Billy invited me over to his house, today."

I talked about him all the time.

"He lived on the morning side of the mountain, and she lived on the twilight side of the hill," I would sing and my parents would smile.

Actually he lived in Dorchester, and I lived in Randolph. It was only because I was driven to school in the city - St. Mark's in Dorchester for seventh and eighth grade - that we ever met.

These were intense years. Even now, when I look back, they stand out like Mount Everest on a relief map. They were two years of misery. I missed Rosemary and all my Randolph friends. I missed belonging to a group. St. Mark's was a parish school; friendships had been long formed. I missed the comfort and familiarity of my own town.

But these were years of growth, too. I learned to diagram sentences, to parse verbs, to appreciate poetry, to calculate percentages, to thank God.

I learned to read, not just to learn, but to experience. We had to read a book a week, but it became more than a requirement; it became something I needed to do.

I learned that it's important to be nice to people. Carol Curtis and Barbara McKenna and a girl named Dottie and Billy Ahlgren taught me this. They'd invite me to their houses sometimes for lunch, because everyone else went home from 11:30 to 1 p.m. every day - except me. I lived too far away.

I learned, too, about love in those years, though I didn't know it then. I remember waiting for Billy some mornings on the corner of his street, so we could walk to school together. I remember showing him poetry I wrote. I remember going with him and Barbara McKenna and another boy to Revere Beach on a vacation day. It was rainy and cold. It felt like November, but we didn't care. We took the train to the beach and sat on the sea wall and got soaked and shivered as we walked around the park, and leaned close together as we rode the roller coaster, again and again, though I hated it, though I've always hated roller coasters. But I liked being with Billy.

We never held hands that day. That would have been an admission of something and there was nothing to admit. We didn't talk on the phone. We hardly saw each other. At school, the boys had a separate playground, and after school I had to go right home. We couldn't be boyfriend and girlfriend. There wasn't room. There wasn't time.

And yet I cried at a school dance - I think it was our graduation dance - when he and another girl won a contest. I thought I was crying because the other girl had won a prize I wanted. And I was. But what I didn't know, what I wouldn't admit, was that the prize was Billy.

We kissed, finally, one day in the woods behind the Boston School for the Deaf. We met there on another cold, rainy afternoon. He and a friend took a bus from Dorchester to Randolph. Rosemary and I walked down Chestnut Street and cut through the field into the woods.

We trudged through mud and talked for about an hour, then I said I had to go home. My feet were cold. My mother would be home soon. Billy took my hand, led me away from Rosemary and his lips brushed mine.

And that was it. The next year he went to boarding school in Rhode Island and I went to Archbishop Williams in Braintree. We wrote back and forth, for a while, not often, just sporadically. When we were seniors, he took me to his prom. A few months later, we graduated and went our separate ways.

I hadn't heard from him in nearly 30 years, until Tuesday when the phone rang and there he was on the other end. St. Mark's is planning a reunion. Someone had found him and he found me, and it was like meeting again on the corner before school, as if we'd spoken only yesterday.

We both have children older than we were when we last met. We both have lived unconnected lives. We should be strangers, but we're not. We remain connected.

For we were young together. We went to school together. We tiptoed around love together. And these memories are an eternal bond.