***Why Don’t You Listen To What I Have To Say- With Rod Stewart’s Lady Day In Mind

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

 

They, Sal and Edwina (no last names needed not out of any sense of legal harm or litigation but because their story survives just as well as if last names were used, survives maybe as a cautionary tale), had met in ninth grade in high school. Okay, I will tell you it was North Adamsville High School, the school that I had graduated from in 1964 although it could have been any high school. The way I heard the story, or the latest version of the story since there have been a few stages to the thing, had been through a connection with my old running mate Brad Badger (running mate in two senses, we were teammates on the track team and we also hung out together in those long ago lonesome sultry, sweaty, no dough North Adamsville summer nights talking dreams, yes, escape dreams).

 

The way I connected with him was through joining the 50^th anniversary reunion class website late last year where I noticed that he had joined, sent him some private e-mails, and we started cutting up torches about old times. Sal and Edwina came into the discussions one time when we were talking about old flames and Edwina‘s name came up because  Brad had had a unrequited  “crush” on her all through high school and never got to first base with her once Sal made his move. Brad also had stayed around town long enough after high school to keep tabs on what the pair were up to and had run into them both a couple of times. So he is the real source of this story, this ill-fated story. (Ill-fated for him as well since Brad tried to get to first base with Edwina again after the pair split. No dice.)

 

I personally did not know either Sal or Edwina but from the ninth grade on until graduation they were one of those “item” things that no school seemed to be without and which was always brought up as some kind of ideal back then, their relationship. Naturally over four years I would have heard about them but they and their problems were off my radar. I do know that at least one girlfriend I had talked dreamily about them. How they fit together and were slated to live happily ever after with kids, dogs and white picket fences thrown in. And maybe it was, and maybe it should have been but the way things worked out, or better, did not work out, that is a very close question.

 What is not in question is that North Adamsville back in those days (now too) was very much a by-the-bootstraps working-class town where almost everybody was poor, or worse. And of course Sal, son of a constantly unemployed bricklayer, and Edwina, daughter of a hardware store clerk, were no exception. So big dates were either double-dates with some Edwina girlfriend whose boyfriend had a car since Sal could never afford a car and his father had no car to offer or else they walked down to Adamsville Beach when their hormones were raging and found some secluded spot to do whatever they were going to do. And by senior year, if you could believe either the boys’ “lav” or girls’ “lav” Monday morning before school talk, they had done the “do” (if you need that explained, well, let’s just assume that you don’t). One of Edwina’s girlfriends who had been sworn to secrecy had told one of her girlfriends and that was all that was necessary. Naturally every virginal guy (and maybe girls too) envied Sal and dreamed of taking his own love down to those secluded sands. The talk around school was that since they were to be married just as soon as they got out of high school (a very, very common experience as late as the early 1960s) that they were just practicing for that eventuality. And so it went all through high school and since Edwina was a beauty and Sal was handsome in his own way they topped off their high school careers as the king and queen of the senior prom (there had been talk that this was a question of sentimental favorites since Virginia Malone was declared by one and all, including me, to be the “fox” of the class).  

And so they graduated with high hopes. Then reality set in. Sal had not been much of a student, had been more of a steady worker type and not an intellectual but he had high hopes of getting into the apprenticeship program for welders down at the shipyard, the major employer in the area giving many fathers good paying if hard jobs and other fathers further down the food chain occasional work when there were ships to be built. The announcement that the shipyard was closing and to be relocated in Greece hit Sal (and many others as well, including my occasional work father) hard. There was nothing else for him to do though but go to work in the dirty dusty granite quarries that was the town’s other major industry. Edwina, having received some scholarship money to go to modelling school, did just that and  was beginning to make connections with various locally well-known photographers and advertisers looking for a certain look, not high–end fashion model looks like in Vogue or those kinds of publications but wholesome looks for average young women consumers. Yes, Edwina fit that need, no question.    

 

And that contrast in fortunes was the downfall of the house of Sal and Edwina. Naturally Sal’s having to take any job he could find left those marriage plans in abeyance since the money at the quarries was a pittance compared to the shipyard work. Moreover Edwina began to take assignments away from town. They fought over this, fought so hard that they decided they needed time away from each other. Or rather Edwina wanted time “to grow” as she put it. The long and short of that “to grow” was that one of the advertiser’s sons that Edwina did work for, Jack Remmick, had taken to her, and she to him. So without telling Sal but also without telling him to get lost Edwina suddenly was not at home many times when Sal called. Moreover one night when she was home and consented to see him she was totally dismissive of him and his dirty fingernails and dusty clothes. And told him. Not good, not good at all.    

 

Eventually Edwina gave Sal his walking papers, although that did not stop him from trying to speak to her about the future. But the more he tried the more she dismissed him out of hand. He tried to confront her with her haughtiness but to no avail, she just laughed at him and told him to go find a nice quarry girl (meaning some girl from among his work-mates’ children, some nice working-class girl, maybe an immigrant, with no prospects except producing many children). It got worse when she snubbed him in public, snubbed him in front of friends. Sal was crestfallen but did not know where to turn. One day on the street he tried to evoke their past, their high school days when she knew what she wanted, and that what she wanted was Sal. She laughed at him again. Worse she plugged her ears when he continued to talk after she said she had to go.   

 

Sal had not seen Edwina for about a year when Brad caught wind of the story when they met in Adamsville Center on fall afternoon. (I had moved away to go to college and had assumed they were married and working on their first child.) Sal kept on saying to anybody who would listen (Brad at that moment) that he knew her back when and that she would be back.  Said he knew that she knew how to do the right thing, had back in the day anyway. Brad just rolled his eyes and thought poor bugger. Me too.