I had a gut feeling something was wrong.
I was on an evening plane home from Florida with my Dad. We had gone down for the weekend to meet up with the rest of my family who were on vacation.
But he and I had left late and were coming back early because we both had work on Monday morning.
It was the end of the Summer where I turned 15 years old.
And, apparently, work was the problem.
I’ve always been drawn to work. I have to imagine it was my father’s influence. He’d been a tireless worker since I could remember. And I’m pretty sure my work ethic comes from him.
Hell, I’m not so sure that my current tendency to dress up in Carhartt and Dickies isn’t just a subconscious desire to wear the clothes he wore as a machinist for most of his life.
Technically, in the state of New York, you aren’t allowed to start working until you are 16. But I found a loophole and began working as a counselor for little kids at the local Jewish Community Center in my town.
When they asked in my interview if I preferred to work three days per week or five, I immediately and instinctively blurted out “five”! It's what a good worker would do.
But this did not sit well with my first girlfriend, who’s idea of a fun Summer was not to sit around while her boyfriend worked but to rather go to the beach with said boyfriend. Who, to my surprise, turned out to be me!
As interested as I was in working, I was even more interested in having a girlfriend.
Ever since Christa Lucida sat at the desk next to me in the fourth grade, girls had my attention. And the idea of having an honest-to-goodness girlfriend was captivating, consuming and also felt like a very distant possibility.
I had no idea how to attain a girlfriend. I had no skill. I had no game.
I saw other boys do it but somehow I couldn’t connect the dots.
So no one was as surprised as I was that, early in my freshman year of high school, I got wind that Donna was interested in me.
And, perhaps more surprising, I managed not to fumble it. I put my arm around her one day while walking through the hall, waiting for the late bus to show up, my trembling hand on the shoulder of her satin team volleyball windbreaker and it became official.
Our relationship was everything you could ask for in your final year of junior high school. We held hands in the hallway. She vandalized her locker with my name. We went to the end of the ninth grade dance together - spotlight reflecting off the disco ball in the gymnasium as we slow-danced to Billy Joel in a scene that could have been plucked directly from a John Hughes movie.
Donna, like a normal junior high girl, wanted fun. I, like an abnormal junior high boy, felt like I needed to start learning the discipline of work, earning money and contributing to society.
With my time being spent around about a dozen Jewish five year olds and without the daily forced interaction of the school hallways, we started drifting apart.
And while a two month Summer break doesn’t seem like a huge mountain to climb, it’s an eternity when you are a teenager. And the reality that we barely saw each other that Summer started to hit me when I had a moment to reflect on it on that Eastern Airlines flight back from Orlando.
I called her immediately when I got home, hoping to salvage the relationship. But my fears were confirmed. She had met someone else at the beach. And, just like that, my first relationship, something that I wanted so badly for so long, was gone.
It’s been almost exactly 38 years since that flight and that phone call and, honestly, I still struggle to find the lesson in it.
Is it the importance of finding relationships where people support you and your goals and your priorities even if it means sacrificing a bit of what they want?
Is it a call to find balance in life? That work isn’t everything and happiness and fulfillment also come from having a few days at the beach?
It’s hard to say. Perhaps asking for a lasting lesson from a junior high relationship is a bit too much to ask.
I remember hanging up the phone and feeling crushed. I went downstairs to find my dad sitting on the couch, watching The Birdman of Alcatraz. I said nothing. I just sat there, pretending to watch, as my insides ached.
In the following weeks, I carried the weight quietly. I peeled her photos off my bedroom mirror one by one, folding them into a drawer I wouldn’t open again for years. I hoped my mom wouldn’t ask why the house phone stopped ringing at 9 p.m. sharp. I buried the heartbreak beneath the kind of silence men hand down like pocket knives - sharp, useful, and entirely the wrong tool for most jobs.
Maybe that’s the real takeaway. Not about balance or work ethic or even the fleeting nature of young love.
Maybe it’s this:
The first time your heart breaks, you learn what kind of man you’re going to be.
I learned to build a wall and labeled it strength.
I fear I'm still figuring out how to take it down.