us.mc572.mail.yahoo.com/mc/welcome?.g…

Who is this? “us.mc572” just doesn’t cut it. Please let me know who you really are. I’ve seen you at my site for weeks, maybe even months. You visit almost every day, but have not left a “comment” or any message to indicate what your interest might be. I have tried, but have been unable to reach you, to determine if you’re a friend or a foe.

The “us.mc” could stand for the Marine Corps. Are you someone in the marines or a former marine? Someone who served in combat —  like myself — but who doesn’t like my anti-war sentiment, my “Act of Contrition” to the people of Vietnam of whom our country tried to save by bombing their country to hell . . .?

I joined Yahoo and a bunch of other forums like Twitter, Face Book and My Space in hopes of contacting you. But, lacking any computer savvy, I couldn’t trace you through Microsoft or Google using this “call sign”  us.mc572.mail.yahoo.com/mc/welcome?.g….

So, I’m going to decide right here and now that you are a friend. Perhaps, an old girl friend. I hope you’re not the first one I was “fixed up” with on an afternoon “blind date.” We had nothing in common. I was a street urchin, well, a city boy, actually, and you were from the “proverbial” other side of the tracks, the suburbs, from a middle class family that rolled up their windows, locked all their car doors, and speeded up when driving through my neighborhood of Brewerytown.

Maybe you’re “Maureen,” that wonderful girl who kept looking at me from the movie theater I visited in Kensington, another tough neighborhood in North Philadelphia. I loved how you would turn your head and look in my direction. I like to think you were looking at me. I was hoping you’d look at me. I liked you immediately, and for the first time in my life  — at age 12 — I felt I understood “love at first sight.” I never saw you after we exchanged first names, and shyly promised each other that we’d meet again. “See you,” I said finding the courage to look you in the eye. “I’ll see you too,” you replied, turning your body a little awkwardly as you clutched your hands  in front of you. “Right here, here at the movies?” “Yeah, right here.”

I never did make it back to the theater.

Did you?

For Part II, see

Are you the one from a ‘path not taken’?