I should have adopted the mantra "she is more important to you than you are to her" in that year; maybe it would have smoothed our path. It was clear to me that non-Jewish people thought differently but my group did think the same and we had the same goals. It took some time to grow out of this attitude. The GF did not think the same as I did, as was shown more than a few times during this year.
OK: during the time from September to December 1974 we talked a lot, went to see theatre shows and films and basically spent much time together (no physical contact). During the week we would speak for half an hour at a time on the telephone. We were ok without being particularly close. January through to March 1975 was near enough the same.
Something changed at the Purim party that year; I don't know exactly what it was but it caused our relationship to become much more physical. Yes! Of course in those days it was pressure-free to be a boy and pressuring to be a girl. So the month between Purim and Pesach was a pretty good time (for me, at least); by the time that we got to the European Seminar, it was too much of a good time and of course I blew it. We had some colossal row, about what I have no idea now, but clearly it was something brewing for some time. The fact that I don't know now - or probably then - what it was about speaks volumes to the mature me that I am now. I wasn't listening to her.
Somehow, with the help of Jeremy and his current girlfriend, both of whom were also at the seminar, we managed to patch things back together again. As I wrote in the previous installment, at the end of the seminar, we all went back to the mo'adon, but GF and I (and others) slipped off to the bayit to sleep properly. So we were ok again.
Here I should mention something of which I am truly ashamed. My room only had a single bed and it was very uncomfortable for two people to sleep in it (I'm not sure that we even tried at first). The first time that GF stayed over, she had the bed and I slept on the floor; very chivalrous. But the second time, I got the bed and she got the floor. And the third time. And the fourth time. So much for "she is more important to you than you are to her" - I was pushing her away instead of drawing her in.
A couple of weeks after the seminar, we had another row that led us not to speak for about three weeks. I really missed her during this period and somehow managed to persuade her to give us another try. Because she was probably off to Australia again and I to Israel again, our paths separated in early July.
When I came back, we had maybe two weeks before she was off again to Switzerland to study French even more deeply. Something very much changed in her attitude during those few days: we became very much closer, so much so that we even spent a night together in my tiny bed, naked. Due to poor timing and innocence, we remained virgins.
Off she went to Switzerland for six months. We wrote to each other every week
but things were different now, and in February 1976 she suggested that we
break up, this time for good. I examined how I felt for a couple of days then
acquiesced. We exchanged maybe one more letter each after this - and then
suddenly it hit me. I was working at Schweppes at the time, and basically
spent one day in the toilet, crying. Paul Simon's "Still crazy" was the album
of the month, and there was a verse that reverberated in my head all the
time:
I didn't know exactly when she was coming home; I wanted to meet up to say goodbye properly and maybe get back the letters that I wrote to her when I was in Israel, 1973-4, as these were a diary of our activities. I kept all of her letters religiously but she probably didn't keep mine. So I phoned her home but they wouldn't tell me when she was coming. I phoned again a week later which is when her mother screamed at me to leave her daughter alone; I was so hurt and upset by this that our entire relationship became tainted in my memory by those final minutes.
And that was that. She and her sisters dropped off my radar. I tried to find another girlfriend, probably too desperately, which is why I didn't succeed. I needed a girlfriend: having one would calm me down and remove much mental pressure that I felt. I didn't have another one until 1980 which is when I met the girl who would become my wife. We came from such completely different backgrounds that there was no way that I might consider that we thought the same about things, although eventually we did think the same about many things.
One night in February 1978, I was driving home (probably from a concert) when behind the Swiss Cottage cinema I saw someone who might well have been the GF, going to her grandmother's house (her grandfather died in February 1975). On the basis of that sighting, I wrote a song about our imagined meeting, called 'Chance encounter'. The first line comes from a well-known song; at the time I was trying a new technique of taking other people's first lines and seeing what evolved. I only did this twice and this is the second song.
* I didn't have a beard in 1978; this comes from a revised version of the lyrics from about 1998 when I recorded the song with MIDI accompaniment.
There is a postscript, two in fact. The first comes from about two months later, in April 1978. As I wrote exactly four years ago when describing the show that we put on for the 50th anniversary of Habonim, after the show, I met my old girlfriend, this being our final meeting. It wasn't too much of a surprise as her youngest sister appeared in the cast but always the fool, all I could talk about was the problem with the guitar and not [ask] anything about her (like how she was, what she was doing, etc).
The second postscript comes from 2008. For some reason, I was looking for information about my university on the Internet and somehow came across the playing fields where I once played a game of hockey in October 1974, trying out for the university team. These fields were on the same road as where GF lived (although at the other end of a long road), and this caused me to start looking for her. I don't think that this was particularly hard but it also wasn't straight-forward. Eventually I did find her and sent a very guarded first email - what if I had found someone else, but with the same name?
But no, it was her. I think that at first she was pleased to hear from me, but then I made the usual mistake of attaching too much importance to something that should be light. After a few more exchanges of emails, the contact died out: we didn't have much to write to each other anymore. I, of course, was very interested to hear what she had to say about me then. As far as I can remember, she said that I was very driven. I haven't reread those emails.
I want to conclude with a song that I wrote around this time, called 'Archeology', that was intended to put an end to the topic, once and forever. It was an interesting technical exercise, writing a song with a five syllable word. Strangely enough, this song is in 3/4 time, as is 'Chance encounter'; pure coincidence. I'm very proud of this song's lyrics, and also of its music that includes many different chords without sounding obtuse.
Despite supposedly putting an end to the subject, this first serious relationship keeps on popping up in my songs. It even appears in my most recent song, 'Rifts and drifts', where of course it is described as a rift. Regrets? I regret how I behaved during the year that we were together and I regret how it ended (although this wasn't my doing), but it doesn't prey on me any more.
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