Fifth grade is pretty much a blur to me. I can really only remember a few things about it. First, I had a bowl haircut. The barber didn’t actually use a bowl, but it sort of looked like it. Second, I had just discovered football, and the Pittsburgh Steelers were my team, so I was always wearing something to school with the Steelers’ insignia on it. On class picture day, I wore jeans and a Steelers shirt with the number 10 on it—decades before the number was worn by Kordell Stewart or by the most recent Super Bowl MVP, Santonio Homes. Anybody remember who wore that number for the Steelers in the mid-70s? It was Roy Gerela, the Steelers’ punter. How many kids wear the punter’s number?
While most of my energies were focused on football, something else began to catch my attention that year—a classmate with long red hair. Her name was Brenda. She was popular—at least as popular as a girl in the fifth grade can be, and by now, you already pretty much that I bordered on being a geek. So I had very little chance of getting her to crush on me. I’m not really sure young love is called puppy love—well, actually I do, it’s because the crush happens early in life—but, a better name might be why-in-the-world-are-my-knees-weak-and-why-is-my-stomach-flipping-flopping-all-over-the-place? Okay, that would be a terrible name, but it pretty much sums up how I felt around Brenda whenever I was around her.
First crushes are so innocent, aren’t they? They are all about little smiles, and giggles, and nervous eye contact, and denial, and more smiles, giggles, and nervous eye contact—all in the hopes that the other person has all of the same things going on inside as you do.
I never got to know Brenda all that well. I was so introverted and the idea of talking to a girl, after girls had been the enemy (with cooties, no less) for so long, petrified me. I must not have hid it too well because I can remember being teased about liking Brenda. Of course, I flatly denied it, but now, more than 30 years later, I admit it. Brenda was my first crush.
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