Life has to be lived in the present

When I was working at the Reno Gazette-Journal in the late 1980s, I wasn't dating much.

I was actually in pretty good shape -- I got down to 160 pounds with a major diet in 1989 -- but I really couldn't find anyone to go out with. My interesting co-workers were mostly already spoken for, and for part of the 18 months I was there, I was still getting over a major disappointment that happened right around the time I left Colorado.

So I didn't date much. But when I got a job in Southern California in April 1990 and was getting ready to leave, a really attractive woman who worked in another part of our building told me it was a shame I had never asked her out.

"I really kind of had a crush on you," she said.

My heart sort of broke, even though I had no idea who she was.

Something similar happened today when I got an e-mail from an old high-school classmate who I vaguely remembered. I looked her up in the yearbook and noticed that she had been pretty, and when I read her second e-mail, she told me that she had sat behind me in English class and had had a crush on me but didn't do anything about it because she was too shy.

I think I considered retroactive suicide. To steal a line from a Woody Allen movie, my social life back then was "The Petrified Forest;" I dated exactly zero girls in my graduating class during high school. It wasn't a small class, either. There were 804 of us.

Actually, those two examples are pretty typical. The first 40 years or so of my life were all about missed opportunities when it came to the opposite sex, so it's a good thing I survived them.

Still, maybe I should have turned around.