Bruce Cameron - Romancing Sandy

Feb 13, 20130

From time to time, I like to leaf through my high-school yearbook, reflecting on the fact that the hair and clothing styles of the time made us all look like lunatics. In my own photo, my odd jacket and long, featureless haircut make it appear as if I’m hoping my class will elect me Bellhop of the Year.

A friend of mine from high school recently visited, and we opened the yearbook to take stock of what we were like when we were young and clueless. “There,” my friend said, stabbing a picture with a finger. “You had a crush on her.”

I didn’t even have to look at the photograph — I knew my friend was right. There was scarcely a girl in high school on whom I didn’t have a crush at one time or another — I spent my teen years wallowing in a stew of forlorn love and nausea.

One girl who gave me abdominal cramps was Sandy Walloon. She lived a block away and was a 14-year-old entrepreneur: For a modest fee, she would come over to your house and scoop up all of your dog poo. I’d see her bent over with a small shovel, patiently filling a large plastic bag, flies buzzing around her face romantically. She was almost impossibly feminine.

Determined to make her mine, I sauntered up to her one day as she was working an afternoon shift.

“Hey, hi, Sandy,” I greeted, my brain’s pistons pumping so fast they seized up. I opened my mouth, hoping more words would come out. A couple of flies, interested, flew around my face like spacecraft circling their home planet. I jammed my fists in my pocket and started kicking furiously at the ground, an action she observed curiously. “Hi,” I barked again, as if clearing a throat obstruction.

“Hi,” Sandy responded cautiously. She had thin brown hair that she didn’t seem to wash very often, but it was clean today, wafting in the breeze in a way that made my knees weak.

“Whatcha got in the bag?” I finally asked, pulling the query from a mental index of The Most Stupid Things I Could Say.

Sandy regarded me oddly, then opened the sack so I could examine its contents.

“Cool,” I choked out. Miserably, I closed my eyes. Cool? I wondered if there were a way I could remove my brain and toss it into the bag with the rest of the dog poo.

“I’ve got to get back to work. The Spitsnogels have a St. Bernard,” Sandy told me.

“Cool,” I said again, because apparently this was the only word I had mastered in the English language. I backed away from her so as to ensure that when I came to a tree root I fell, sitting down directly in evidence that the Spitsnogels did, indeed, own a St. Bernard.

I was 14 years old, and this was the sexiest conversation I’d ever had. I went home and industriously wrote, “I love Sandy,” on my desk blotter, which was easy to do because it already said, “I love Susie,” so all I had to do was cross out and replace 4 letters.

Now that we were all but engaged, I felt emboldened to chat with Sandy at school. I had my topic all figured out: At our home, it was my job to clean up after the family dogs because we were too classless to hire Sandy’s corporation. My tool, the aptly named “Sooper Dooper Pooper Scooper,” was a high-tech solution to the fact that the chore was essentially dirty business. I knew Sandy would have a professional opinion about it, and I approached her in the hallway after class, knifing right between a circle of her friends.

“Sandy,” I said, “I scoop with a sooper dooper.”

I believe these were the last words ever I spoke to her — the look on the faces of the girls convinced me I’d somehow made a gaffe. In fact, the next meaningful communication I had with her was at the end of my senior year, when she wrote in my yearbook, “I had such a crush on you in 9th grade.”

I knew it!

(Bruce Cameron can be contacted at http://www.wbrucecameron.com.)

Editor’s Note: The following column was originally published in 2008.