I didn’t realize I was old enough to have a photo of me in sepia.
It isn’t like I’ve never seen one before. I had a picture done in 1989 in Virginia City, Nevada, with my friends Tom Kensler and Greg Henry. Of course that was a staged old-timey photo of three gunslingers. It was supposed to be sepia.
But I’m pretty sure this picture here was originally just a black and white snapshot.
I know it was taken in the spring of 1970, a little more than 50 years ago. I’m pretty sure it was taken at Great Falls, Virginia, on a family outing that I brought my girlfriend at the time to. My girlfriend Shelley was of course the one on the right, my mother in her prime was on the left.
I’m the one in the middle, and at age 20, I was probably the closest I have ever been to being really good looking. When I look at pictures from that time, I can hardly believe it. When I first saw a color slide of myself from around that same time, it took me a lot of long hard looks before I believed it was me.
My reaction was, I was never that good looking.
And I am not fishing for compliments here.
From third grade on, I was a year younger than my classmates. Couple that with puberty arriving very late and a complete lack of confidence with girls and for much of high school, I might as well have been in the Vienna Boys Choir.
Of course, I couldn’t even sing.
My first year of college was the first time I ever dated anyone more than once. She was younger, a high school cheerleader, and we went out five times over three months. We saw Peter Paul & Mary in concert. I was so shy with her that I never even held her hand, let alone kiss her.
It was nearly two years later that I met Shelley, and we were together for nearly six months till the relationship died out when she went home to New England for the summer. It was a relationship I learned a lot from and the one that meant the most to me until my first wife came along in the mid ’70s.
I’ve had other relationships that meant a lot to me, including one that was very special that lasted on and off all through the ’80s. But they all pale next to the love of my life, my soulmate Nicole.
On Monday we’ll celebrate our 28th wedding anniversary, not bad at all for a second marriage.
The one thing I know is there won’t be a third.
She is at the top of my list as my favorite person in the world, just ahead of our two children, their spouses and our grandchildren.
They’re enough to fill my heart with joy.
The only thing I still can’t understand, though, happens when I look at the picture.
If I was ever that good looking, how come I didn’t know it?