Robby and the Pencil Point

When I was in the second grade I had a little crush on Robby M. He had a crush on me too. Nothing had been said, but a girl knows these things.

He would rub my arm, and then smack someone else’s arm and say “You have Tammie Odor! I quit! No backsies!” So of course, a big “Tammie Odor” fight would ensue…

“Tammie Odor! I quit!”

“Tammie Odor! I quit!”

“Tammie Odor! I quit!”

The boys would chase each other, lunging and dodging, slapping the Tammie Odor around. The girls would just stand there and watch, arms crossed, heads tilted to the side, eyebrows raised. Boys were stupid.

But then Robby would pick me to be on his kickball team on the playground at lunchtime. And he would pass notes to me that said “Who do you like?”

He would try to make me laugh during music class.

He would sit at my table during lunch. He said he liked my Muppets lunchbox.

During a class trip, he wrote R+T in the fog of the bus window above his head. He even drew a heart around it.

One day the two of us got in trouble for talking during Mrs. Rogers’ class, so we had to stay in for lunch and work quietly at a round wooden table in the back of her classroom. We sat on the small pastel chairs, opened our reading comprehension workbooks, and started filling in the blanks, circling True or False, and drawing lines from the word to the matching picture.

Sometime after Mrs. Rogers stepped out of the room, a small argument erupted between us, which led to an all-out battle. The brief focus of my elementary school affections jabbed me in the thigh with a pencil, piercing my white tights. I was absolutely enraged.

I poked him in the eye.

By the time Mrs. Rogers came back, Robby had an ever-reddening eye full of eyelashes, and I had the point of a #2 HB in my leg.

We were sent first to the nurse, then to the principal’s office.

It was the first time I’d ever been sent to the principal’s office. Mrs. Waldron was old and stern in her white ruffled shirt, buttoned high on her neck, and her drab, floor-length skirt. Her eyes were two different colors, and it seemed that one of them never really looked at anything. The hallway rumor was that she had a glass eye. I surmised that it was the brown one, because the blue one was bloodshot all the time. We were given a talkin’-to and a warning, and we were sent back to class.

So Robby and I hadn’t even reached the point of confessing our young love, and the relationship was over. A week goes by so fast…

I never got that pencil point out of my leg.

I made several attempts at removing it over the years with a pair of tweezers and once with a sewing needle, but to no avail. It still floats around inside of me, hidden. I can’t feel it, but it’s there.

Occasionally, it makes its way to the surface. I’ll notice a little dark spot on my leg, just below the skin. But it refuses to be removed, and my efforts just send it deeper into hiding.

That is, until the next time it worms its way up to poke at the underside of my skin. A sly, secretive reminder of a love from long ago.

And that’s the way it is with those expired love affairs. You don't feel them anymore, but they never entirely go away. They’re inside of you, a part of you.

Every once in a while, they resurface for a moment. Sometimes they just smile and wave at you, and you think, “Aw, I remember that. Those were some good times.”

Other times, they sneak up on you and try to squeeze your heart, try to make you remember what you felt like when you were caught in their grasp, or how you felt when it was over.

Over time their power over your heart diminishes, and the little reminders floating through the currents of our insides carry no feelings at all. They’re just memories.

But we learn from those past experiences. We learn about people, we learn about ourselves, about love and what we want out of life. Maybe they even make us better for the next time.

They help make us who we are.


"You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves." - Saint Francis de Sales