Tempus fidgets, as my mother used to say. (Yah: very funny. Chortle!)
Yesterday evening I was thinking about my college boyfriend — let’s just call him P. — whom my parents hated, loathed, and detested.
Why they so reviled the man was something I could never figure out. To this day, it’s just a guess…but revile is the word. The detested him at a professional level.
My guess is that it was because he was from an Eastern European background, and they were bigots at a professional level.
You understand: he was NOT European. He was born and raised in Chicago, as were most of his nearest relatives. But in my parents’ minds…well…once a Bosnian, always a Bosnian???
My parents demanded that I break up a two-year relationship with P., one that had become serious enough that he and I assumed we would marry after we finished at the University of Arizona. When my mother made it clear that I would have to choose between them and him,…well…there really wasn’t a choice. I wasn’t about to abandon my parents, who had hauled me all over the world, provided a sterling upbringing, and sent me, on their dime, through four years of college.
A few other details frosted that cake, though. I think the one that cinched my decision came when his best buddy took up with a barfly, frolicking merrily in the sack with her…while his wife was too pregnant to accommodate him.
Seriously: the guy’s wife is eight or nine months along, and there he is, screwing this chippy. And P thought that was cool, just hunky and dory…after all, his wife couldn’t or wouldn’t let him have any. What’s a man s’pposed to do?
Right?
All my mother’s vociferous objections to P had little effect on my taste for him. I was madly in love, after all. Right?
But when, that night as we lingered in bed together, he remarked that “A guy has gotta have it,” excusing his friend’s faithless lust, I thought…ah hah! If you think that’s OK for your pal, you’ll figure it’s OK for you.”
Right?
Uh huh… Well, right or not, out he went. I flang him out: sent him off weeping into the night.
That that was the last I saw of him.
From what I can tell, he went back to the Midwest, got a master’s degree in those parts — in Education, the easiest of all possible programs — and then dove into a series of bureaucratic jobs. Turns out that for some time during my last stint as an Arizona State University bureaucrat, he was working in the ASU president’s office!
I had no idea. Didn’t find out about it until I was long gone from the Great Desert University, as was he. If ever I encountered him on the campus, I didn’t recognize him.
Which, I suppose, is just as well.