I walked off to junior high that first day feeling like a big kid. I was then just under five feet in height; I was to grow seven inches in the ensuing three years. I was two years away from my first period and ten years away from noticeable tits, but I was finally arriving. I went without my eyeglasses. I considered (and the following year would wear) white lipstick and fishnet hose. I met Jim Sanders.

He was a bit chubby. A few inches taller than me, so that was fine, but he had some girth. Dark hair, golden skin, blue eyes.

The most amazing eyes. They looked right into me and they TWINKLED. His black lashes curled tightly above deep blue, and his eyes appeared to me like humor and love.

I didn’t fall in love; rather, I was drawn and expanded into those smiling eyes.

It was unproductive but it wasn’t unrequited. Jim liked me too; as I was long after to learn, that’s why he twinkled. We were eager and ecstatic at the idea of each other, and we were awkward and embarrassed in each other’s presence. The eagerness was sufficient for several phone calls and a bike-with-picnic date; the embarrassment was so powerful that our little heat could not withstand the freeze of his friends’ mockery. We were sitting on the grass outside the Science Building that Saturday, munching peanut butter and Frito sandwiches and drinking plain water (having decided to save the Lime Fizzies for tongue dessert) when Andy and Ray came along. We started joking around about our English teacher, and I laughed so hard I farted. Loudly. Unmistakably. Andy and Ray whooped it up and I didn’t know enough then to maintain my composure. It wrecked the date. Seemed to humiliate Jim. We retreated from puppy lovers to classmates. I stalked him a little bit, hanging around the golf course with my horsey girlfriends his neighbors, and now and then he looked at me THAT way, but I went Jimless the rest of that year, and had to settle for the tepid attentions of mere boys.

We sparked again after a summer’s absence, at the beginning of 8th grade. But we never made it to the solidarity of good coupledom; regularly we were rocked by peer mockery or our own embarrassment, and I left before conditions were obtained that would have allowed our affection to endure.

My family moved to a place called Kentfield in a beautiful county which is named Marin and whose residents want to call it just the County. I missed my friends but I flourished in the rising Bay Area culture of 1966.

And so on. We each lived another three decades. I married and got a job and had the kids, moved to San Jose, divorced, married, divorced and settled in Oakland.

Meanwhile Jim married and moved to New Mexico, had his son and lost his wife to a woman, tried the Sacramento area and job-by-job migrated west as far as Walnut Creek. Kept active. Stayed fit. Dated but didn’t settle down again. Had a stroke.

It happened last month. A Transient Ischemic Attack, or TIA, sometimes called “local anemia.” Something temporarily blocked an artery in the left side of his head, and for eighty-five minutes Jim was paralyzed on his right side and couldn’t speak. He says it scared the shit out of him, not being able to make his body move, not being able to make words. He says he thought he was dying.

The doctors don’t know why it happened and can’t find any clots in Jim. They have him taking aspirin every day to thin his blood, and they’ve made him promise to come in for more tests, now and later.

Jim grew depressed about his health. He was ecstatic to live, of course, and determined to make more of his life, but the stroke shook him, to say the least, and while finding no clot was good, finding no reason was not. He started obsessing about it happening again, it happening when he’s alone, it happening worse.

I guess that’s when he remembered that he had loved me. I have an unlisted number and I use my married name, but my parents still live in the house in Kentfield. Jim found me through them.

So here we are, getting old and getting together. Sometimes we regret the missed years, but then one of us theorizes that it’s not a big loss. Memories of adulthood are glossed by time’s speed and dulled by nostalgia; Jim and I still have our shared pungency. Every once in awhile I look at him and see the young man in there. As he can see the girl in me. His hair is graying but he’s not bald; I’m not fat. His eyes still twinkle now and then; sometimes I still dance.

Jim describes his stroke as the first time he died. I tell him that’s the wrong end of the telescope. I say this is another of his times being born. He counters that I should say “other end of the telescope” instead of “wrong end.” I tell him he shouldn’t say “should.” Then I get a bit irked at him and don’t want to see his twinkling eyes. I go for a walk.