Racism blamed in Quincy slaying

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

"Don't waste your tears," my mother used to say when I was young and moping around the house because John W. didn't talk to me at CYO, because John W. didn't notice me at school, because John W. didn't like me though I liked him more than I liked any other boy in the world.

"Save your tears for real sorrow," my mother said the afternoon I came racing into the house, sobbing because John had finally asked me out and I couldn't go. I thought she was heartless. I'd already accepted a date to the Victory Dance and I had to turn John down.

I moaned about that decision for a solid two years, the time it took for him to ask me out again. No matter where I was, no matter what I was doing, I was always thinking, "if only."

If only he'd asked me sooner. If only I hadn't been so quick to accept the first invitation. If only I could do it all over again, everything would be different. John and I would be together.

I found a note recently, which I wrote about him, tucked inside the cover of my high school yearbook. We'd stood side by side in the school yard at a fire drill in October of my sophomore year. He'd talked to me that day, joked with me. "Maybe he will call," I wrote in perfect Palmer penmanship. "Maybe he feels the same way I feel."

But he didn't feel about me the way I felt about him, and he didn't call - not for a long, long time. In the interim, I thought about him constantly. Every time I read a love story. Every time I passed his locker. Every time I went to CYO. And every time I heard "Johnny Angel."

I laugh now when I think about all this adolescent angst. What an incredible waste of energy. How could I have been such a jerk? Why didn't I just forget about him? Why did I spend so much of my youth wishing for someone I hardly knew.

I made him up, of course, fashioned him into what I wanted him to be. When we did start to date, years later, when we were both in college, the real John W. wasn't at all like the one I'd invented.

Love doesn't make you miserable. Love makes life better. Love builds you up, it doesn't tear you down.

But I pretended he was. In retrospect I think that I'd invested so much energy in pursuing this relationship, that I couldn't admit, not even to myself, that he wasn't who I wanted him to be.

He's not nice enough to you, my mother used to say. And she was right. He wasn't. But I stuck up for him. I understood that he wanted to go out with his friends. I understood that he wanted to date other people. I didn't mind that he called me at the last minute, and sometimes didn't call me at all. That's what I continually said.

But I minded. Here I was finally dating this guy I'd been crazy about for years. Here I was with exactly what I wanted. But I wasn't happy at all. I was still shedding tears behind closed doors.

It's easy now to say I should have dumped the guy, or given him a choice, his freedom or me. Don't let him take you for granted. Don't always be there for him. Date other people. You're young. There are other fish in the sea. These are the words adults use. These are the things my parents said to me.

But they were the wrong words. What they should have said is: Do you want to spend the rest of your life feeling this way? Do you want to always play second fiddle to some one or some thing? If he constantly puts his friends before you now, if he'd rather be with them, fishing or camping or just hanging out, than be with you, then what makes you think things will be any different after you're married? They won't be. It will just be more and more of the same.

I bring this up today because a young friend spends far too much of her time crying over a man she says she loves, a man she insists loves her.

Love doesn't make you miserable, I want to tell her. Love doesn't break your heart every other day. Love makes life better, not worse. Love builds you up, it doesn't tear you down. If it doesn't do these things, it's not love. It's invention or habit or loyalty or devotion.

But it's not love. And it's not worth a lifetime of tears.