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This is the way it goes. On the last day of school your friends all sign your yearbook. Then everyone splits up for the summer. In the fall, you’re all back in class again.
Until graduation day. Then everyone signs your yearbook one last time, maybe at greater length, with cute remarks about some especially memorable thing you did or said in school, some inside joke you and the signer shared. (Years later, when you open that yearbook again on what T.S. Eliot called “the evening with the photograph album,” you won’t remember what the joke was.)
Again everyone goes their separate ways, only now it’s for keeps. “We’ll pass, and be forgotten with the rest,” Tom Lehrer sang in one of his early satirical songs. It was meant for a laugh, and it got one on the old comedy album where I first heard it, a reminder that pain, the truth that hurts, is almost always a key ingredient in humor.
When I got the news last week that one of the most beautiful girls I had known in high school had just died of cancer at the age of 50, one of the first things I remembered was something she wrote in my high school yearbook the spring I graduated. I was wrapping up my senior year, getting fitted for the graduation gown. She was a junior, would graduate the following spring.
“I hope we’ll remain friends over the years,” Cindy Buford wrote.
So much of life is about regrets. People who say they “have no regrets” must be spending most of their time on some planet other than Earth. Missed opportunities alone form a whole sub-category of regrets, and who among us can claim they’ve never missed an opportunity? Here was one more item to add to my catalog of regrets, that Cindy and I did not remain friends over the years. I lost touch with her quickly after high school, never saw her face again until her family sent me some photos at my request for use in this blog posting.
In fairness to those of us who knew her in high school, then lost her, it wasn’t for lack of trying that we were unable to reconnect. My old pal Charlie Berigan, who graduated in the same class as Cindy, (the three of us were in the Chula Vista High School choir together) attended her memorial in my place. I live in the state of Washington these days and couldn’t make it back to California on such short notice. Charlie called me the day after the memorial gathering and we had a long chat about his experience there. “They had a video, and two big photo collages,” he said. “And it was strange to see all this and realize, here was an entire life that we didn’t even know about.” Well, yes, we’re all fiftyish now and I saw Cindy for the last time shortly before her 18th birthday. A lot of water flowed under a lot of bridges that I never even saw.
But on at least one occasion that I remember, Charlie and I did make an attempt to find Cindy. This was maybe the mid-1990s. He and I happened, every now and then, to be back in Chula Vista at the same time although life had taken us both far and wide from the city in which we grew up. I’d been in the foreign service and had traveled all over the western half of the globe; Charlie had spent most of his adult life in New York pursuing the career of a musician.
On one such visit home, probably over a bottle of scotch and a bowl of melting ice, we got to sharing memories of the Spartan Choir and the people we had known there. It was inevitable that Cindy’s name would come up, and it did.
Neither of us was much of a sleuth, but a day or two later we made a stab, in our own clumsy way, at tracking her down.
We didn’t get far. Anyone who has ever tried to organize a class reunion knows how it is. The boys are usually much easier to locate than the girls, because girls so often get married and change their last names. We didn’t find Cindy and the matter was, with palpable regret, dropped. We both would have loved to see her, or at least talk with her again.
The years continued on their way. Then about a week ago came that phone call. Charlie spotted the death notice in the San Diego Union-Tribune of someone named “Cindy Buford-Wissbaum.” There was no chance of a mistake. Time had run out while we weren’t looking. Cindy had died on Christmas Eve, but we were just now finding out about it. He read the obituary to me, word for word. Then I went online and found the electronic version of the death notice. I knew that SignonSanDiego.com, the Internet version of the Union-Tribune, had a “guest book” feature in its obituary section and I wanted to sign the guest book in case one of Cindy’s family might contact me through it. The death notice did not mention what had killed her, but as a former newspaperman who has written his share of obits, I could pick up clues. It said that she had died “surrounded by her family and friends,” which is obit-speak for a long illness. Of course I guessed cancer, and I turned out to be right, as I learned a few evenings later when her sister called me (I’d left my phone number in the guest book) and we had a long visit. Cindy had actually survived one bout of cancer, only to be stricken with another, in another part of her body. How could such a thing have happened, especially to a girl I remembered as being so beautiful that heads would turn when she walked into a room?
Mine included. I don’t remember ever having the big adolescent crush on Cindy myself, although I did, during the latter part of my senior year, have it pretty bad for her shotgun-riding pal Laura. But for Cindy I remember feeling only the normal, routine lust that any healthy, heterosexual 17 year-old boy would feel for a pretty girl at school. That and a kind of deep, jokey affection. I teased Cindy often. Her striking feminine beauty notwithstanding, Cindy at 17 had an incorrigible trash-mouth. She could talk like a longshoreman, and often did. I gave her a bad time about it now and then. Sometimes she would laugh. Sometimes would tell me to f*** off. Sometimes both. But when she signed my yearbook, she thanked me, in affectionate terms, for “all your advice.”
In fact this jocular to-and-fro about her cinematic “saloon girl with a golden heart” routine (and the golden heart was beyond question) led to our one and only date, Cindy and me.
Of course I had a secret wish to go out with Cindy. Most of the boys who knew her did, I’m sure. But I never had the nerve to ask her out. First of all, I knew she wasn’t interested in me that way and secondly, I was shy around girls. I remember being gratified to read years later in a magazine article that most adolescents actually get through high school without ever going out on a date. The dating group on high school campuses is actually a minority, and was even in my day, the early 1970s. I was one of those kids. I belonged to no clique. I was neither an athlete, nor involved in student government, nor a debater (although I was on the speech squad my senior year) nor in the school band. I didn’t have my own car until college. Pretty much all I had were the highbrow novels I lugged back and forth to school, and a somewhat sullen, rebellious attitude. Girls, by and large, were not interested in me. Friday and Saturday nights were for television, not dates.
But one evening the choir was performing at some music festival or other and I saw an “opening” which might allow me to make a date with Cindy relatively risk-free, which is to say a proposal unlikely to get me crushed like a bug on a windshield. Not for a thousand dollars would I have walked up to her and said, “Cindy, will you go out with me?” That would have been tantamount to playing chicken at 90 mph, with a similar danger-level. No, what I did instead was play an angle off my sometimes-flirtatious “Cindy, quit acting like a whore” routine. I approached her backstage near the beginning of the show and said, “Bufe,”—I always called her ‘Bufe,’ never ‘Cindy’—“I’ll tell you what. If you can conduct yourself like a lady for just one evening, keep your language squeaky-clean, I’ll take you someplace expensive for dinner.” I had a weekend job in a gas station which put a few dollars in my pocket and made such an offer possible.
“The Hotel del Coronado?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said nonchalantly, my knees shaking.
“Can I have lobster?”
“Yeah, you can have lobster. We’ll both have lobster.”
She took the bet and won it. She even came up to me at intermission and gave me a curtsey. (She was being a bit of a smartass.) Anyway, we both won that night. She got a promise of a fancy dinner out and I got a date with one of the prettiest girls in school, if also the one who might have been voted most likely to win the Redd Foxx Pottymouth Bake-off.
One of the reasons I have not gotten further in life than I have is because I’m a terminal procrastinator. You’d think a boy who had just made a date with a knockout like Cindy would want to cash in as soon as possible. No, I think it was July before I got the nerve to actually call her up and ask if she would like to have that promised dinner. We arranged a date and I made a reservation at the Hotel del Coronado's storied Prince of Wales Grill. (A not-too-relevant factoid: more than 30 years later my wife Valerie and I would spend our wedding night at that same hotel.)
On the night I went to pick up Cindy at her parents’ home, I was delighted to find that she had “fussed” a little for our date—she had dressed up, in a blue chiffon something-or-other. Matching pale blue shoes. She looked absolutely marvelous. I was probably wearing the navy-blue sport jacket I’d gotten as a graduation present—anyone out there remember double-knits? Over this I recall wearing an overcoat, a second-hand one that I’d bought at a thrift shop. Overcoats are not de rigeur in southern California, particularly not in July, but I was 17 and putting on literary airs. Somehow I had decided that writers wore overcoats. So off we went to dinner in my mother’s faded green 1965 Chevy Bel Air, the fairy-tale princess on the arm of Lieutenant Columbo.
I remember little about that evening except that I was nervous and unsure of what to say or do from moment to moment. We dined in the Prince of Wales Grill, all right. A lobster dinner for two in 1973 cost $25; that detail I do remember. After dinner we walked around the hotel grounds a bit, then headed back to Chula Vista where, in a major step down to low-rent, we ended up having dessert at Daisy’s Coffee Shop. I don’t remember what I had; Cindy had cheesecake. I remember using the word “discreet” in our conversation, which she didn’t know, and trying to explain to her what it meant. After dessert I was at an embarrassed loss to suggest what we do next, but Cindy solved the problem by saying “I want to go home.” So I took her home. I think I got a little kiss, and then she went into the house and that was that. I probably drove home and watched The Dick Cavett Show.
I saw Cindy one more time. I came back to my school to visit one day the following winter. You could still do that in those days—there was no seven-foot-tall metal fence surrounding the campus and you didn’t have to sign in at the front office, either. You could just park and walk on in. Unbelieveable, now.
It was lunchtime and all the students were milling around. As I parked my car in the parking lot, Cindy spotted me, ran over to my car and gave me a big hug. That was the last time I ever saw her.
Then came all that stuff Charlie was talking about, all the things that comprise an adult lifetime, to which he and I were not privy, the things we didn’t get to share with Cindy because, in the sloppy, arms-too-full way people tend to lead their lives, we let her get away. She was married twice. (There’s a funny story, apparently, about how she met her second husband, Larry Wissbaum, while out searching for her cat, also named “Larry.”) She had no children, but did have a stepdaughter, and numerous nephews and nieces. She had a career in dental hygiene. She became an enthusiastic devotee of fishing. She moved to Colorado, where she died.
In the classic play Our Town, playwright Thornton Wilder tries to impress upon his audience the significance, in the cosmic scheme, of the minutiae which make up 99 percent of our waking lives and which, ironically, we don’t notice. Consider the implications of that. “Suddenly,” the stage manager who narrates the play says, “You clap your hands and bang! You’re 70.” And out of the 36,792,000 minutes, including those you spend asleep, that make up those 70 years, maybe 36 million go by unheeded and unremembered. Every night when you dream your brain does a kind of “core dump,” sorting through experiences and throwing out those it judges to be toss-able. Probably to be too overloaded with memory would result in some kind of psychosis. (I think Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story about this.) But contemplating Cindy’s life and remembering the small part of it that was part of mine, it’s strange to think that she went on to become a whole other person than the one I knew. She forged a trail of experiences and perceptions in the 33 years after our last meeting of which I was not, and could not be, any part, just as I did and of which, conversely, she was no part. We knew each other, Cindy and I, when we were young, slim, unwrinkled and in my case, with a full head of hair, all of which we took for granted as youth does, and all of which vanished as we moved on and on into that territory that Henry James called “The general lost freshness.” In Our Town, the character Emily, who has just died in childbirth, is offered a chance to go back and re-live one day of her life. She chooses her 12th birthday, but finds the experience so unbearable that within moments she asks to be returned to the cemetery. Every moment was so innately precious, and she appreciated so little of it. The realization is more than she can bear.
For the same reason, I don’t suppose I would want to re-live that summer evening again, when Cindy and I were young. But it was a gift I’m glad time allowed us to share, and Cindy was a gift everyone who knew her will always cherish, as long as memory permits. I’ll never have the chance to tell Cindy how important she was, or even how much that one evening when we were kids meant to me. I just hope she knew, and, perhaps, knows. R.I.P.
Until graduation day. Then everyone signs your yearbook one last time, maybe at greater length, with cute remarks about some especially memorable thing you did or said in school, some inside joke you and the signer shared. (Years later, when you open that yearbook again on what T.S. Eliot called “the evening with the photograph album,” you won’t remember what the joke was.)
Again everyone goes their separate ways, only now it’s for keeps. “We’ll pass, and be forgotten with the rest,” Tom Lehrer sang in one of his early satirical songs. It was meant for a laugh, and it got one on the old comedy album where I first heard it, a reminder that pain, the truth that hurts, is almost always a key ingredient in humor.
When I got the news last week that one of the most beautiful girls I had known in high school had just died of cancer at the age of 50, one of the first things I remembered was something she wrote in my high school yearbook the spring I graduated. I was wrapping up my senior year, getting fitted for the graduation gown. She was a junior, would graduate the following spring.
“I hope we’ll remain friends over the years,” Cindy Buford wrote.
So much of life is about regrets. People who say they “have no regrets” must be spending most of their time on some planet other than Earth. Missed opportunities alone form a whole sub-category of regrets, and who among us can claim they’ve never missed an opportunity? Here was one more item to add to my catalog of regrets, that Cindy and I did not remain friends over the years. I lost touch with her quickly after high school, never saw her face again until her family sent me some photos at my request for use in this blog posting.
In fairness to those of us who knew her in high school, then lost her, it wasn’t for lack of trying that we were unable to reconnect. My old pal Charlie Berigan, who graduated in the same class as Cindy, (the three of us were in the Chula Vista High School choir together) attended her memorial in my place. I live in the state of Washington these days and couldn’t make it back to California on such short notice. Charlie called me the day after the memorial gathering and we had a long chat about his experience there. “They had a video, and two big photo collages,” he said. “And it was strange to see all this and realize, here was an entire life that we didn’t even know about.” Well, yes, we’re all fiftyish now and I saw Cindy for the last time shortly before her 18th birthday. A lot of water flowed under a lot of bridges that I never even saw.
But on at least one occasion that I remember, Charlie and I did make an attempt to find Cindy. This was maybe the mid-1990s. He and I happened, every now and then, to be back in Chula Vista at the same time although life had taken us both far and wide from the city in which we grew up. I’d been in the foreign service and had traveled all over the western half of the globe; Charlie had spent most of his adult life in New York pursuing the career of a musician.
On one such visit home, probably over a bottle of scotch and a bowl of melting ice, we got to sharing memories of the Spartan Choir and the people we had known there. It was inevitable that Cindy’s name would come up, and it did.
Neither of us was much of a sleuth, but a day or two later we made a stab, in our own clumsy way, at tracking her down.
We didn’t get far. Anyone who has ever tried to organize a class reunion knows how it is. The boys are usually much easier to locate than the girls, because girls so often get married and change their last names. We didn’t find Cindy and the matter was, with palpable regret, dropped. We both would have loved to see her, or at least talk with her again.
The years continued on their way. Then about a week ago came that phone call. Charlie spotted the death notice in the San Diego Union-Tribune of someone named “Cindy Buford-Wissbaum.” There was no chance of a mistake. Time had run out while we weren’t looking. Cindy had died on Christmas Eve, but we were just now finding out about it. He read the obituary to me, word for word. Then I went online and found the electronic version of the death notice. I knew that SignonSanDiego.com, the Internet version of the Union-Tribune, had a “guest book” feature in its obituary section and I wanted to sign the guest book in case one of Cindy’s family might contact me through it. The death notice did not mention what had killed her, but as a former newspaperman who has written his share of obits, I could pick up clues. It said that she had died “surrounded by her family and friends,” which is obit-speak for a long illness. Of course I guessed cancer, and I turned out to be right, as I learned a few evenings later when her sister called me (I’d left my phone number in the guest book) and we had a long visit. Cindy had actually survived one bout of cancer, only to be stricken with another, in another part of her body. How could such a thing have happened, especially to a girl I remembered as being so beautiful that heads would turn when she walked into a room?
Mine included. I don’t remember ever having the big adolescent crush on Cindy myself, although I did, during the latter part of my senior year, have it pretty bad for her shotgun-riding pal Laura. But for Cindy I remember feeling only the normal, routine lust that any healthy, heterosexual 17 year-old boy would feel for a pretty girl at school. That and a kind of deep, jokey affection. I teased Cindy often. Her striking feminine beauty notwithstanding, Cindy at 17 had an incorrigible trash-mouth. She could talk like a longshoreman, and often did. I gave her a bad time about it now and then. Sometimes she would laugh. Sometimes would tell me to f*** off. Sometimes both. But when she signed my yearbook, she thanked me, in affectionate terms, for “all your advice.”
In fact this jocular to-and-fro about her cinematic “saloon girl with a golden heart” routine (and the golden heart was beyond question) led to our one and only date, Cindy and me.
Of course I had a secret wish to go out with Cindy. Most of the boys who knew her did, I’m sure. But I never had the nerve to ask her out. First of all, I knew she wasn’t interested in me that way and secondly, I was shy around girls. I remember being gratified to read years later in a magazine article that most adolescents actually get through high school without ever going out on a date. The dating group on high school campuses is actually a minority, and was even in my day, the early 1970s. I was one of those kids. I belonged to no clique. I was neither an athlete, nor involved in student government, nor a debater (although I was on the speech squad my senior year) nor in the school band. I didn’t have my own car until college. Pretty much all I had were the highbrow novels I lugged back and forth to school, and a somewhat sullen, rebellious attitude. Girls, by and large, were not interested in me. Friday and Saturday nights were for television, not dates.
But one evening the choir was performing at some music festival or other and I saw an “opening” which might allow me to make a date with Cindy relatively risk-free, which is to say a proposal unlikely to get me crushed like a bug on a windshield. Not for a thousand dollars would I have walked up to her and said, “Cindy, will you go out with me?” That would have been tantamount to playing chicken at 90 mph, with a similar danger-level. No, what I did instead was play an angle off my sometimes-flirtatious “Cindy, quit acting like a whore” routine. I approached her backstage near the beginning of the show and said, “Bufe,”—I always called her ‘Bufe,’ never ‘Cindy’—“I’ll tell you what. If you can conduct yourself like a lady for just one evening, keep your language squeaky-clean, I’ll take you someplace expensive for dinner.” I had a weekend job in a gas station which put a few dollars in my pocket and made such an offer possible.
“The Hotel del Coronado?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said nonchalantly, my knees shaking.
“Can I have lobster?”
“Yeah, you can have lobster. We’ll both have lobster.”
She took the bet and won it. She even came up to me at intermission and gave me a curtsey. (She was being a bit of a smartass.) Anyway, we both won that night. She got a promise of a fancy dinner out and I got a date with one of the prettiest girls in school, if also the one who might have been voted most likely to win the Redd Foxx Pottymouth Bake-off.
One of the reasons I have not gotten further in life than I have is because I’m a terminal procrastinator. You’d think a boy who had just made a date with a knockout like Cindy would want to cash in as soon as possible. No, I think it was July before I got the nerve to actually call her up and ask if she would like to have that promised dinner. We arranged a date and I made a reservation at the Hotel del Coronado's storied Prince of Wales Grill. (A not-too-relevant factoid: more than 30 years later my wife Valerie and I would spend our wedding night at that same hotel.)
On the night I went to pick up Cindy at her parents’ home, I was delighted to find that she had “fussed” a little for our date—she had dressed up, in a blue chiffon something-or-other. Matching pale blue shoes. She looked absolutely marvelous. I was probably wearing the navy-blue sport jacket I’d gotten as a graduation present—anyone out there remember double-knits? Over this I recall wearing an overcoat, a second-hand one that I’d bought at a thrift shop. Overcoats are not de rigeur in southern California, particularly not in July, but I was 17 and putting on literary airs. Somehow I had decided that writers wore overcoats. So off we went to dinner in my mother’s faded green 1965 Chevy Bel Air, the fairy-tale princess on the arm of Lieutenant Columbo.
I remember little about that evening except that I was nervous and unsure of what to say or do from moment to moment. We dined in the Prince of Wales Grill, all right. A lobster dinner for two in 1973 cost $25; that detail I do remember. After dinner we walked around the hotel grounds a bit, then headed back to Chula Vista where, in a major step down to low-rent, we ended up having dessert at Daisy’s Coffee Shop. I don’t remember what I had; Cindy had cheesecake. I remember using the word “discreet” in our conversation, which she didn’t know, and trying to explain to her what it meant. After dessert I was at an embarrassed loss to suggest what we do next, but Cindy solved the problem by saying “I want to go home.” So I took her home. I think I got a little kiss, and then she went into the house and that was that. I probably drove home and watched The Dick Cavett Show.
I saw Cindy one more time. I came back to my school to visit one day the following winter. You could still do that in those days—there was no seven-foot-tall metal fence surrounding the campus and you didn’t have to sign in at the front office, either. You could just park and walk on in. Unbelieveable, now.
It was lunchtime and all the students were milling around. As I parked my car in the parking lot, Cindy spotted me, ran over to my car and gave me a big hug. That was the last time I ever saw her.
Then came all that stuff Charlie was talking about, all the things that comprise an adult lifetime, to which he and I were not privy, the things we didn’t get to share with Cindy because, in the sloppy, arms-too-full way people tend to lead their lives, we let her get away. She was married twice. (There’s a funny story, apparently, about how she met her second husband, Larry Wissbaum, while out searching for her cat, also named “Larry.”) She had no children, but did have a stepdaughter, and numerous nephews and nieces. She had a career in dental hygiene. She became an enthusiastic devotee of fishing. She moved to Colorado, where she died.
In the classic play Our Town, playwright Thornton Wilder tries to impress upon his audience the significance, in the cosmic scheme, of the minutiae which make up 99 percent of our waking lives and which, ironically, we don’t notice. Consider the implications of that. “Suddenly,” the stage manager who narrates the play says, “You clap your hands and bang! You’re 70.” And out of the 36,792,000 minutes, including those you spend asleep, that make up those 70 years, maybe 36 million go by unheeded and unremembered. Every night when you dream your brain does a kind of “core dump,” sorting through experiences and throwing out those it judges to be toss-able. Probably to be too overloaded with memory would result in some kind of psychosis. (I think Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story about this.) But contemplating Cindy’s life and remembering the small part of it that was part of mine, it’s strange to think that she went on to become a whole other person than the one I knew. She forged a trail of experiences and perceptions in the 33 years after our last meeting of which I was not, and could not be, any part, just as I did and of which, conversely, she was no part. We knew each other, Cindy and I, when we were young, slim, unwrinkled and in my case, with a full head of hair, all of which we took for granted as youth does, and all of which vanished as we moved on and on into that territory that Henry James called “The general lost freshness.” In Our Town, the character Emily, who has just died in childbirth, is offered a chance to go back and re-live one day of her life. She chooses her 12th birthday, but finds the experience so unbearable that within moments she asks to be returned to the cemetery. Every moment was so innately precious, and she appreciated so little of it. The realization is more than she can bear.
For the same reason, I don’t suppose I would want to re-live that summer evening again, when Cindy and I were young. But it was a gift I’m glad time allowed us to share, and Cindy was a gift everyone who knew her will always cherish, as long as memory permits. I’ll never have the chance to tell Cindy how important she was, or even how much that one evening when we were kids meant to me. I just hope she knew, and, perhaps, knows. R.I.P.
