It’s funny what sticks with you over the years.

When I was a freshman at Eldorado High School, unsure and unconfident, I remember one fall evening sitting out on the big rock by the east parking lot waiting for a ride home. It was following an evening tryout for the school’s basketball teams. It was quiet sitting there on that rock, and an orange hue sat on the Sandia mountains to the east.

Sitting on that rock, I remember thinking about tryouts, and basketball, and Eldorado. My mind raced with a dream.

The only thing I had really hoped to accomplish in high school was to play varsity basketball.

Later that week, I learned I had made the school’s freshman team.

I was in the program.

I got to wear the jersey of a high school basketball player.

I was an athlete.

I look back sometimes surprised at that kid, that that kid was me.

Part of the benefits of being on the team was discovering before a few games that I had a secret sister. One of the freshman cheerleaders left me a plate of goodies a few times, which was a surprising gift for this shy kid.

I didn’t know who the kind girl was, or really who any of the cheerleaders were more than at an acquaintance level.

One of them, though, one morning, shocked me late in the season.

For some reason, we were both walking up an outdoor staircase between classes and we had some reason to small talk. And as she was getting ready to go to the left when I was going straight on, she turned to me and said, out of the blue, “I wish I had been your secret sister.”

—

I didn’t date at all in high school. I didn’t know what it was about. I couldn’t make sense of romance as a teenager, although I was surrounded by it some, like most high school kids with friends hooking up and growing up and going out.

I loved the idea of it, as I suppose I always have- having a love- despite the fact my life has been pretty bereft of relationship and romances.

I tried to make sense of love back then, and I still try to make sense of it, another experience I had that baffled me. Three years later, after being a shy freshman kid, as a senior, I ended up popular, and somehow ended up on the school’s Homecoming Court. And ended up as the school’s Homecoming King.

I was also, earlier that fall, after three years as a kid striving to improve and to climb the ladder in the basketball program, cut as a senior in tryouts and did not make the varsity team.

And then the one girl at the school I had grown very close to over the prior two years and was crazy about rejected my request for her to be my homecoming date.

I remember those odd events from being in high school.

But I still strongly remember the girl on the steps at school that day my freshman year, and the words she said, and how they filled up my heart.

—

As we went on in high school, I got to know who she was a little more year by year. We both ended up in school government, and our senior year, we were both class officers, working together for our class.

She had probably forgotten her secret sister comment three years later- we never became super close colleagues, which is not unusual for me. I am not great at being super close to most people. But I still wanted her to like me.

—

A few years back, our class had our 30th year reunion, and I saw her at a restaurant meetup.

I approached the group she was talking with to say Hi to everyone.

She said a cordial hello to me, as did everyone else.

In recent years, I had talked to her a time or two on Facebook. She had been communicative but brief. Not unpleasant. She had been married for a long time to a man a company I used to work with had done marketing for, but that was ending. Her son was now a varsity footballer at our same old high school. She wrote on Facebook a lot about spiritual things, Christian thought and such, which I thought we perhaps could connect over.

I walked around the small circle at that restaurant and tried to engage her, just to reconnect after not seeing her for a long time- not expecting anything, except a short light conversation.

And she turned and kept talking to the gal she had been talking to, knowing I was there.

I stood by her for a moment, a little surprised, and then uncomfortable, and then confused. And then I detached from the group and found others who wanted to talk with me a bit.

I don’t know why people choose to love you. Or why they decide they don’t like you.

I was “married” for two years, and that was about twenty years ago, and I have been alone most of the time since.

After this gal and her husband and her divorced last year, I learned she was engaged again a few months ago.

But at one time, a long time ago, she wanted to be my secret sister.

And learning that meant a lot to me back then, an awkward freshman kid trying to find his place.

Who is now in midlife.