Step 1: Be Heard

“BE A PART OF THE EQUATION”

by OPOVV, ©2013

(Sep. 6, 2013) — I had a crush on her as big as the moon. She was my first “True Love,” even if I had no idea what “love” was. My daydream scenario always took place in some kitchen, me at the table and her at the stove, or the refrigerator. Maybe she was making me a bowl of Sugar Pops: yellow box with Roy Rogers and Trigger on the front. Our class gave a play about some Feudal Lord, and she was my partner while we danced the minuet, my only contribution to the play. At the beginning of Act II, as the curtain was rising, I held her especially close, and her quick reply was “Don’t you dare.”  I remember my first thought as if it were yesterday, “How in the world can an eight-year-old girl have such wisdom?”

I was cured. She cured me, and the next time I fell in love it was for real, but I ran into my first crush some 20 years later after that 3^rd grade play and I told her how devastated I was. You know what she said? She said that she waited for me, from that day until I left to see the world after we graduated from high school, to make a move on her, to ask her for a date, to do something, for Heaven’s sake. Hey, how was I to know?

The moral of that story was “It doesn’t do any good keeping quiet.” Of course there’s a flip side, but I’d have to say that the “not doing anything” is worse than “doing the wrong thing.”

When I lived in Daytona Beach I had a friend who met the girl of his dreams, a tourist from Ohio, and she felt the same about him. From the first second they met they were together, until she had to fly back home, vacation over, but she’d write him when she moved out from where she was living and made a home for them both.  He never got that letter, and he never got her address. They were two young kids in their 20’s, thinking that life is laid out all nice and neat.

A couple of weeks later my friend just packed up and moved, left town, didn’t tell his parents or any of his friends, just vanished. I’d stop by every once in a while to see if anybody heard from him, or seen him, anything. Then one day, about six months later, I see this guy in the grocery store, the guy who lived next door in the duplex to my friend, and tells me to stop on by a little later, and I do.

He says he’s moving, but, just for the heck of it, one of his kids looked in the mailbox at the curb. He says they never get mail there, that they have a PO Box at the main post office, because of his business, but his kid found a letter addressed to my friend, which he gave me.

I took the letter home and noticed there wasn’t any return address, just his. I opened the letter and the only thing inside was a one-way plane ticket, first class, to Columbus, Ohio, and a note, which read: “Just found us a home, don’t even know the address, but will meet your plane.” I looked at the ticket again, and it was for a specific flight on a specific day, six months previous.

Life is full of surprises and disappointments. But the greatest regret, the biggest blunder any of us can make, is keeping quiet when we should speak up, even if we don’t particularly like the outcome: AT LEAST WE TRIED.

Go ahead and write City Hall, write an editorial to your local newspaper, write to your political representative, and write comments to The P&E. Make yourself heard. We need feedback; we require a finger on the pulse of the nationwide community; we need reader participation. Be a part of the equation.

OPOVV