Three chicks at the same time

It occurs to me that I’m not nostalgic enough. I want to spend more time recounting events of yore. Memories, I know, are wildly inaccurate, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have fun inaccurately recalling them.

First up is a true(?) story of my romantic prowess in 4th grade.

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Three chicks at the same time. You heard right.

Somewhat remarkably, in the 4th grade class of 1995 at Whitehouse Elementary, I was the most popular boy in school. I credit my popularity to the fact that I was best friends with the most athletic boy in school, a farmer kid who dominated Track and Field Day but happened to be painfully shy. Athleticism buys you popularity, but not if you won’t talk. I was shy, too, but not as shy, and I was goofy enough to make kids laugh, so I managed to soak up the popularity he should’ve had.

In case you’re dumb, popularity is how you win chicks. Popularity just means that other people like you, respect you, or otherwise hold you in high-esteem, and what I’ve deduced from 26.5 years of experience is that, even going all the way back to 4th grade, the thing femmes find most attractive in a guy is simply being held in high-esteem by his peers. (So stop posting pictures of your abs on Facebook, please.) It’s another one of those dumb heuristics forced upon us by Nature. For guys, we use heuristics like waist-to-hip ratio and hair quality to judge attractiveness. For femmes, it’s whether and to what extent other people seem to admire him.

Being at the top of the 1995 Whitehouse Elementary 4th grade class primate pyramid, I pretty much had my pick of the female litter. And why stop at one?, I thought.

Five seems a bit excessive. Even four could become a headache on Valentine’s Day. Three, though, that seems reasonable.

If I remember correctly, the way you enter a romantic relationship in fourth grade is by whispering hints through intermediaries followed by direct note-passing and then, if all goes smoothly and you can tolerate all the lame pink hearts on her notes, it culminates in hand-holding during roller-skating parties.

I don’t know whether the girls knew about each other, but I imagine if they didn’t it was willful ignorance. The entire village of Whitehouse had about 1,000 people, so you can’t not know about who’s holding hands with whom. But I don’t recall getting an ounce of flack for it. They tolerated it. And it was awesome.

Of the three, I had a clear favorite. Major crush on this chick. I’m pretty sure hers was the first butt I found intriguing. She was the best student in school, the best female-athlete, and the prettiest. She had dimples the size of a fruit rollup, and she had a trademark hot pink windbreaker that was so… hot.

With the other two chicks, I was content to just hold hands and be done with them. I wasn’t going to hang around and pretend like I cared about the weird stuff going on in their female brains. Chrissy, on the other hand,… well, okay, I wasn’t interested in her female brain either, but I definitely liked to look at her.

Chrissy induced in me for the first time in my life the masculine urge to display my affections through the gift of shiny metals. It wasn’t really optional. This was my future wife, most likely, and she had to know I was serious about it.

I distinctly remember the day. It was the last day of classes and we were standing outside of school saying goodbyes and boarding buses and whatnot. Chrissy was in her trademark hot pink windbreaker, looking hot.

That’s actually all I remember. I don’t remember exactly how the gift was delivered or received. There may have been a hug involved, or maybe a smile, but I think it’s more likely that this was one of those situations where you walk up to her, plop it in her hand, and then head for the minivan. Summer awaits; no time for chit-chat.

(You might wonder where a fourth grader finds jewelry for his “girlfriend.” Answer: On his big sister’s dresser. )

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Postscript

I don’t have Facebook, and the reason is because I don’t feel like it. The most reasonable explanations I can give for why I don’t feel like it are because (1) the envy would destroy me, (2) I worry about my inability to avoid impulsively clicking stuff, and (3) I prefer to remember people in this form. I want to remember Chrissy as the amazing hot pink windbreaker-wearing girl with the enormous dimples, not as the girl who got married after high school and now has a couple of kids and a mortgage. Facebook would pollute my romantic notions of childhood, and that might be the last frontier of romanticism I have left in me.