ASPIRATION: 4 Dear John

King Street, Winnipeg, in the falling snow by Bryan Scott

Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.

― Alexander Pope

I believe the launch of my army career had triggered a change in me... though I hesitate to say precisely what that might be. Fore sure, I was fitter than I had ever been since childhood, but this magnificent vigour was unlikely to last for long. How much exercise did fully trained artillery officers actually get, I wondered? And how would I react, in course of time, to a life that denied me a right of choice in fundamental matters, such as the choice of a place to live? In fact, I have to admit right now that I didn't wish to be disturbed by fundamental changes in my life. Didn't the fact that I had cast aside my chance to become an infantry officer demonstrate that such a choice would take me too far from home?

But now that I had in fact returned home, I found that I was not exactly enamoured with it, and I was soon consumed anew by the old bogy of boredom. As a result, I turned again to past distractions. As it happened, my friend Larry had broken with his old flame June and was going now with a girl called Ann, who was able to acquaint me with a friend of hers. Now, if I had been able to fathom the least little thing about females in those days, I would have sensed that this one was not for me, but to my limited mentality woman remained a closed book. Thus, I took up with Joanne.

The girl was a virtual deaf-mute. She answered anything you said in three words or less, but never began a sentence of her own. Instead, she kept her mouth in motion with a wad of chewing gum, so that getting through an evening with her was something of an ordeal. Why did I do it?

Well, first, I ascribed part of the blame for my washout with women to a failure to seem interesting enough, a fault I hoped to remedy in the fullness of time, and second, though Joanne was not the most alluring of girls, her features were not untouched by comeliness – at least to my eager masculine fancy at the time – and she was rather petite with long black hair. In short, she was a girl, and at almost twenty years of age I was keenly feeling the need for one.

Naturally, my lack of savoir faire with the fair sex made me a bit thin-skinned and anxious to get the social niceties right, but Joanne's stony silence, a practice that lessened the link between us, sometimes made my cheeks flush. As they did one evening when we undertook the seemingly simple task of descending from an all but empty bus.

As we neared our stop on Corydon Avenue, I led the way up the aisle from the back seat and swung open the little gate before the back door and stepped down ready to descend. But ghost-like, Joanne crept past my back, it seems, for a moment later I saw her short form posed on the step before the front door! What in the world was she doing there? I wondered.

Corydon Bus 1960s

I was mortified. And then some wag of a passenger wisecracked:

“Meet you half-way.”

At that, my head shrank into my collar as the bus slowed to a stop and we alighted yards apart. At times thereafter I fancied she'd concocted that farcical performance, just to make me feel silly, and at others I was certain it had all been a crazy mistake. But I never gave vent to any of these fancies in view of the padlocked aspect Joanne unfailingly displayed, and she never mentioned the matter either.

Whenever we returned to her house in the evening, the problem that always occupied my mind was how to kiss her goodnight after that disastrous episode with my first girlfriend, for she always got upon the second of the three steps before her front door and just perched herself there viewing me mutely! And chewing – always chewing! Was that done on purpose too? I never did kiss Joanne because I couldn't solve the problem in physics she invariably set me: how to embrace a girl in an authentic manner while she was standing on a step looking down at you!

I no longer recall the exact path travelled by my fractured amity with Joanne. The pair of us spent several evenings together, I believe, on weekends when I visited Winnipeg from Shilo, and I likely sent her a letter in the third week of January, for a reply came dated January 23^rd. It was typed on two tiny sheets, and in it she waxed quite chatty for a change.

She said she’d attended a party recently and met ‘a real nice guy’ that she thought was more her type, by which she meant, you can guess, a type less timid with women! She hoped I wasn’t too disappointed and ‘as things were turning out’, she said, she didn’t think we should 'date each other again' because I could be meeting the right girl for me and she could be meeting the boy for her.

Well, I thought she’d just met one. Anyway, she went on to say ‘I think it is only fair to you that I do this, for I am only wasting your time’, adding, ‘you are one of the nicest guys I ever met. I wish you the best, and I hope we can still be friends.’

Friends? Whenever were we more? It seems she had a fancy for a role in which a queenly magnanimity could be paraded before a rejected lover. Being ‘a nice guy’, I felt, was not a lot of compensation for losing a girl, but I was not yet wise enough to realise that most ‘nice guys’ end up either celibate or under the thumb. I would have to make myself more stern, more steely, more strong-willed, and I would have to banish any idea of being a 'nice guy', if I ever wished to win a woman.