First Love or Heartbreak featuring Kris Jacen

       What is it about the blush of first love that captures the imagination? Is it the romantic in all of us? Whether the first love comes at 16 or 24 or 44, it’s the emotions that can just blow apart any logic you throw at it. Now, I’m not talking about first LUST. That’s another thing entirely.

      Does love at first sight exist outside of romance novel? I like to think so. Way back in ancient times…okay, maybe just back to when Duran Duran and Journey were all over the radio waves, a young teen was sitting in the back of the chorus room with her friends and saw HIM. The senior with a good voice and the jeans over work boots. The two became friends that school year but alas the senior disappeared after graduation with not even a goodbye.

      Fast forward a few years, to when Sophie B. Hawkins “wished she was your lover”, the young teen is now a junior in college and home taking a nap between classes during Spring semester and the phone rings. She grumbles into the phone “this better be good” and promptly drops the phone. You see, that boy that she was friends with? He’s on the other end of the phone. Seems he enlisted in the Army after graduation and was home on leave. Did she want to go out before he left?

      With one date and a spectacular goodnight kiss—off he went again with no way for her to contact him, until she found his parents’ phone number and asked his mother for his address. Putting pen to paper (remember this was ancient times before email became so available), she wrote him a letter of the goings-on in her world and mailed it off to Korea. The two became pen-pals, talking about everything and anything with a phone call here or there.

      For Christmas that year, the girl’s best friend asked her what she wanted for Christmas. Her reply? “A certain Soldier.” Well, Christmas came and went with no word from the Soldier. The morning after Christmas the phone rings and it’s the Soldier with one question to ask (after apologizing because there were no available phones to call on Christmas) “will you marry me?”

      That Christmas proposal was twenty-two years ago this past year. With many moves and two daughters, they’ve gotten through it all with many more adventures still to come. So if you ask me if I believe in love at first sight? I think so, just ask the girl got that senior-turned-Soldier that she unknowingly fell in love with in the chorus room all those years ago.