“Well, why didn’t you?”

—So asked a classmate at my 40th high-school reunion in 2002.
My wife was still alive then; she went with me.
She died of cancer ten years later, just short of my 50th.
I singled out this lady and said “Would that I knew back then what I know now. I woulda taken you out.”
“Well why didn’t you?” she exclaimed.
“Because back then I was royally messed up. The product of hyper-religious parents, and others, who convinced me ‘NO GIRL WILL ASSOCIATE WITH YOU!’
I was rebellious and DISGUSTING because I couldn’t worship my holier-than-thou father.
Not much changed until my wife died. Since then my sordid childhood has been flip-flopped.
Self-loathing continues, but I since befriended so many pretty ladies it became apparent ‘NO GIRL WILL ASSOCIATE WITH YOU!’ was bunk.
Perhaps you remember the following,” I said to my high-school classmate.
“Botenelli was dee-jaying a Jr. high sock-hop at Springer, and engaged me to entertain with my sax.
After my sax, Botenelli left, and I fell to dee-jaying myself.
BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM! on the far-away locked front-doors of Springer.
It was my hyper-religious father come to retrieve his rebellious son.
What I remember most is the look of horror on ***** *****’s face as my father dragged me away by the ear.
‘Is this for real? Is this actually happening?’
Yes *****, that was my father, prone to fits of amazing madness. And I was playing the Sword-of-the-Lord card.
To my father I was evil.
(***** went on to marry her high-school sweetheart, and was also our school’s humanities scholar. Our school didn’t have a valedictorian, which she woulda been.)
Shortly after my family moved to northern DE, another classmate invited me to a sock-hop.
‘ARE YOU KIDDING?’ I shouted. ‘No way is my father gonna let me attend a dance.’ —No prom for this kid either. My sister did after a screaming Mexican-standoff with my father, which my mother ended: ‘Oh Tom, I think it’ll be all right.’”
(Dancing, of course, was Of-the-Devil to my father.)
“We’da gone to Lynthwaite’s for ice cream,” I told my classmate.
“I wish we had,” she said.

• During junior-high and high-school I blew first-chair alto saxophone. (No longer.)