I Found a Country Girl

And I did not make her my own

This isn’t about the right one. After many years I found the right one. It is about how we make decisions and whether we can really understand our own motivations.

College was 4 to 1 guys and worrying about grades. I had one very superficial relationship. First-year medical school was an information torrent and worrying about grades and being scared in general and 10 to 1 guys. No girlfriend.

The next summer(1974), I signed up for a state program to put medical students in small country towns that needed doctors. I was 21 years old. Why did my state do this?

1. Overt: Expose med students to family practice. My med school did not have a Family Practice Department. They thought it was a stupid idea.
2. Covert: Hope this neurotic city fella wants to come back to Farmer Falls and practice in their twenty-bed hospital. With no ER and a 19th-century lab. And doctors who literally trained in the pre-antibiotic era. Who don’t write prescriptions, just hand out pills from big jars over the sink without counting them. Who give everyone blood thinners to “help the circulation.”
3. Deep Cover: If City Fella won’t come back, get him to take one of our lovely princesses with him.

Everyone was real nice and right off I met the head nurse at the hospital and her family. Which included a girl I will call Lacey. She was three years younger than me. I definitely noticed her.

Lacey considered objectively:

• Her Mom and Dad were awesome. My parents preferred to avoid each other and I think preferred their children to go off somewhere they weren’t. Lacey’s Mom was gregarious and genuinely kind. She was the whole town’s Mother. Her father was the High School Principal and a manly master of all he surveyed. He could do incredible water skiing tricks with a chair. Both of them seemed glad I was around. I would have joined that family in a second if they were recruiting on Indeed.
• She was intelligent, blonde, sweet, tall, and plumply cute in the country girl way. They consume a lot of fried chicken and potato salad. I will admit that I found her very attractive.
• She was crazy about me in a way I have never experienced before or since. She accounted for my every second and tried to anticipate my every wish. She told me I was great and looked at me like I was made of precious gems.
• Her parents wanted me to be her boyfriend in the worst possible way and not because I would be a rich guy. (Good thing. That never panned out). For some reason, they thought I would “treat her good.”One of the strangest conversations I have ever had was one time her mother took me aside to discuss Lacey’s physical attributes. She had a slightly crooked nose from a childhood accident and her mother wanted to know if I was “satisfied” or if it should be fixed. Did I like her long hair? It could be shorter. She could exercise more. She would be smarter after going to college.

It dawned on me her mother was negotiating the Bride Price

• In Meatloaf’s iconic song I never could have been said to get past first base, more like a pop-up to the catcher. I dimly understood the consequences of a more passionate affair would include public beheading followed by being drawn and quartered and dragged by oxen unless engagement was in the offing.

Intermission

Perhaps you think I exaggerate. The other med student I was with actually did come back to that tiny burg and marry a girl he met that summer. She was a lot more country than Lacey and trapped him by wearing a knit bikini whenever he saw her and going to the Drive-In with him and taking him home and feeding him mashed potatoes. No idea how that turned out. I met her father and he was possibly the scariest corn farmer in America. A bloodstains in the root cellar type.

Why Not Lacey?

So this is the enigma. Why did this lonely young man presented with an attractive intelligent young woman who was crazy about him not embark on a relationship, let her mature a bit, and marry her? I would have stayed in my home state. I would still be married to her. We would have children and grandchildren. I am sure as I can be we would have worked things out. I might be having my 45th anniversary.

Instead, I saw her a few times over the next three years and never seriously considered having a real relationship. She eventually married and I have not seen her for 40 years. I moved far away then moved four more times. I had ten different jobs. I had a horrible 16-year marriage to the wrong woman. Finally, I am now married to the right woman and have been for 22 years.

So why not Lacey?

• My mother constantly told me what to do. I wanted to make my own decisions. I couldn’t tolerate being told what to do by another middle-aged woman. If Lacey’s mother was against our relationship I would have been more interested. If her mother liked me she must have some sinister motive.
• I simply did not value myself. All the good-looking girls in high school acted uninterested and this somehow made them more attractive. Lacey’s attraction to me meant she was less desirable. Could it be that marrying a girl who “pretends” she doesn’t like you might not turn out well?
• I thought there was a “magical somewhere else” where I would be cool and somehow better. Take it from me. there is no such place. “Wherever you go, there you are” as they say. Lacey represented never going off searching for that nonexistent place. Of course, if I had told her we needed to go to Albania and be cliff dwellers she would have gritted her teeth and done it. I am sure as shooting. After a few years, the whole family would have moved into the adjacent cave.

The best thing about finishing medical school in my deluded immature mind was that I could go away as far as possible from my home. So I went to Northern New England for my residency. Strangely that made me out of place as well as uncool with no friends or support system.

When you are old you look back on your life. I would want my life to turn out the way it did, two people and three dogs in the Southeast. But the process of getting here was a rancid mess.

Writing this story was an attempt to try to dissect the past. My fundamental mistake was believing that I grew up in a uniquely undesirable spot and that all of life’s issues can be solved by getting away. Where you are is fine. You know it pretty well. It is your niche, Mr. Square Peg. Riff on it. Celebrate its good points. If you don’t quite fit in that square hole smooth out your rough edges. Don’t move to an impossible round hole.

Judy Walker wrote a much more coherent story that inspired me.

Here is another from me. Also about the 1970s