DONNA, PARTS II and III

A SLIGHT REPRISE; ORIGINALLY POSTED 1/11/2007


Do we meet those we dream of as they dream of us?

"In the second grade we were allowed to walk home from school for lunch. Its hard to believe they let us do that. I don't think that can happen these days.
I always walked with Donna Hartlieb. We would part at the corner and meet again to return to school. Every day my mother gave me a Baby Snickers Bar for the walk back and I would split it with Donna on the corner.
To this day, I can still see Donna leaning on that tree at the corner with her little Red Riding Hood jacket on, waiting for me.
One day I asked Mom if I might have two candy bars.
She inquired as to why I would need two. I told her all about Donna and how we walked together everyday, and how I split my candy bar with her always.
I'll never forget the look on Mom's face.
"Oh yes, Stevie, you certainly may!"as she dried her hands on her Watermelon Apron and pulled another Snickers Bar from out of the cupboard.
She was beaming.

        *******

Donna sat next to me in the first and second grade. I fell in love with her one day when she helped me do an exercise in the workbook that I didn’t get at all. But that’s a whole ‘nother story. We shared Snickers bars on our walks back home from lunch. I moved back to Texas in the 6th grade.

Over the next several years, passing from a kid to a teenager, with all the hormonal turmoil, and love lost and found and lost again, and pleasures and pains, and learning to kiss and touch and care and lust, I would and try to find a balance between friendship and desire. It was the 70’s and easy to be consumed with desire. I found it was hard to have one without the other, and that I had to have the friendship, or the desire was unfulfilling and contrived. I just didn’t warm up to people that fast, and I never left a bar or party to take a girl home that I didn’t already know her. Never.
Sometime in the middle of all this, when I was 21, a failed romance jogged my memory of Donna and brought fresh revelations of what it meant to have a friend, to really like someone, and to be in love.
I wondered did or would Donna remember me, and the Snickers bars I brought her. I wondered what her memory of me might be, and how that memory might have affected her relationships the way she (and that look on moms face) still affected mine.

This was on my mind very late one night in 1978, and I decided to drive to Detroit to see if I could find Donna. It was about 3:00 a.m. as best as I can figure when I left Texas. I was wearing cut off shorts and a T-Shirt and had no shoes.
Somewhere around Cleveland my car broke down. I had to walk the rest of the way. It had become quite cold and the wind was blowing very hard as I entered the Detroit city limits. I made my way north, up Jefferson Ave. to Grosse Pointe Park. People were looking at me, staring at me as I had few clothes, and like I said it was quite cold...
I walked down Windmill Drive and up Trombley, past my old house, and took a left on Essex... there were kids on bikes going to school.
I was shivering at the corner of Essex and Harcourt, the very corner from 15 years prior when-where Donna and I would part and reunite.
And then I saw her.
She was on a Red Schwinn, with the big Chopper handlebars and Banana seat and with the pink and white streamers that flapped in the wind. She still had the blonde hair, cut "Pixie" style, and the Little Red Riding Hood jacket, but like me, she was older now.
It was Donna, and she had seen me.
She did a quick U-Turn and approached me, her face full of recognition, smiling and ringing the little bell that went "Ching-Ching" with her thumb..
I thought I could tell she knew who I was.
My heart is beating wildly.
“What are you doing here? Aren't you cold?” she asks.
‘Yes, but I wanted to see you” I say.
“Do you know me?” she asks.
“You are Donna”
“Yes, how did you know?
“I used to live here, I used to walk with you”
Her face is even more full of recognition now and I am so full of emotion I can scarcely even say the words, cannot find the voice to ask that which I have come 1100 miles to ask.
‘Donna, do you remember me like I remember you?”

I see it in her face, in her eyes, all she has to do is say the words...“Yes, you are Steve, and I remember you so well, we walked and talked and you shared your candy bars with me..”
But I cant get the words out, they are stuck in my throat. Its excruciating and then things got all watery and...

I WOKE UP.

And I was shaking and shivering, and crying too, and I was cold and the next three days I was feverish with the Flu...
If I have ever had a dream where I went somewhere and met someone... that was it. Which made me wonder…

Do we meet those we dream of as they dream of us?

32 Years later I would find Donna. With the miracle of Facebook I found lots of my old friends from Detroit. I shared the dream with Donna.
“No” she said “I kinda remember you. I don’t remember the snickers bars. But thank you so much for reminding me of my Little Red Riding hood jacket. I loved loved loved that jacket.”
And you know what? That right there was worth it.