The Crack of Dawn #634

Volume #634

8/1/24

Newsletter #634

The Crack of Dawn

I’ve been farting around with this newsletter for over a week.  I guess that I was waiting for a topic to occur to me, and it finally did.  But not right away.

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Here is an interesting fact that I just ran across.  The Washington Monument was started in 1848, using one kind of marble, then was stopped in 1854, first due to funding, but then came the Civil War.  When construction started again in 1877, and was finally completed in 1888, it was with a different marble.  The difference in the marble can be seen 150 feet up the obelisk.  The Washington Monument is indeed the tallest obelisk in the world.

Meanwhile, when I arrived in Haarlem this last time, opened my backpack and found that I didn’t have the utterly unique power cable for the laptop, I really felt the universe intruding on my plans.  Ostensibly, the only reason I’d gone to Europe was to write.  Maybe start a new book.  With a computer, of course.

But I did have my leather notebook and a pen, and I wrote everywhere I went, so I never actually stopped writing.  However, without the computer, writing the things I thought I was going to write—like some interesting newsletters—became impossible.

Thus, I was forced to pay more attention to my immediate reality and the question—could I live in Haarlem?  And the answer was, eventually, no.  And there was really no point in having a place there because I can go there any time I want and stay in a nice hotel.

What was I thinking?

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OK, so that’s what I had written, and was just sitting there for a week because it’s not very interesting.

The night before last, my buddy John, the human grapevine, called and said, “You won’t like this.”  I don’t know what I imagined for a second there, then I said, “Yeah?”  John said, “Chiara Sherwood died.”  And it hit me as a hard blow in its own way.  Harder than I would expect regarding someone that I hadn’t seen in at least 50 years and didn’t really know.  But she was my first girlfriend, for a very short time.

Chiara was the prettiest girl in our elementary school, or at least I thought so.  Chiara was a perfect, pretty, sunny, little, round-faced, straight-haired blonde.  I was in 6^th grade, and she was in 5^th.  The entire Sherwood family, including her two older sisters, her younger brother, as well as her parents, were so attractive that they modeled as a family.  Inside the cupboard where I kept my stereo, I had a full-page ad for Chrysler vans that had the whole Sherwood family arrayed in front of van.  Chiara was wearing a blue dress and flats, with her hands folded, looking demure.

Being boyfriend and girlfriend meant that I went home with her after school (she lived right next to the school), and we would hang around together.  I remember sitting in her sister’s bedroom listening to the brand-new album, Bridge Over Troubled Waters.  And we kissed a number of times, but not like adults kissed.  We kissed with just our lips.  This mostly occurred on a couch in the garage.  I look back through the mists of time—over 50 years—and it seems so wonderfully innocent.  And Chiara was so flat-chested that there was no getting to 2^nd base, or even thinking of it.  It was good enough. And she was so gorgeous.  Our romance lasted possibly two weeks, if that.

One day I was showing off on my bike and ran over her little brother.  Chiara got so mad at me that she ended our relationship right there.  She sent me away. I was aghast.  Can she do that?  Yes, she can.  I would go then go out of my way to ride past her house, hoping to see her, and sometimes I even did.  We would smile and wave.  And that was that, and life moved on.

The last time I saw Chiara was a few years after high school.  A buddy of ours, John Cameron, was the bartender at the bar in the neighborhood bowling alley.  He would give us free drinks.  A few of us were there at the bar and who came in but Chiara, looking cute in red pants, with Bill Leonard, whom I was informed was Elmore Leonard’s son.  I said, “I’m going to go say hi to Chiara.”  I walked over to the lane where they were bowling and made small talk.  It went fine and I went back to the bar.  I said, “I think I came off pretty well.”  John pointed down and said, “I’m sure you did, your fly’s down.”  And it was.  I was utterly mortified. 

At some point I heard that Chiara had wiped out on a bicycle on gravel and pavement, mostly on her face, and that half of her face was seriously injured.  I never saw it.  Or did I and I’m somehow blocking it out?  I’m not sure this long afterward.

Apparently, she died of pancreatic cancer, and it was possibly as long as two years ago. And there had been a GoFundMe campaign to get the money for medical care, but the goal was never reached.

Chiara Sherwood.  The prettiest girl, who liked me for a short time.

Eventually, a topic came to me.