Let me tell you about George Smith. This innocuously named young man was my first true love. We had beginning that could have been in a romance movie screenplay. I was a freshman at Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos in 1965, living in a dorm directly across from the student union. Many of the 500 students were from rural or smaller towns all over the State. The girls came to earn a teaching or nursing degree. Most of the dudes were ‘shit-kickers’ studying agriculture. There were some theater people and a few others, like me, studying sociology, the sciences or liberal arts.
During the first week of class, I was sitting in the student union with a group of girls when someone handed me a folded note. It read “Can you meet me tomorrow at 4pm by Old Main?” I looked up to see who might have passed that note to me. I locked eyes with a most appealing young man. He had shaggy brown hair, a mustache and goatee, and was dressed beatnik-like with a tan corduroy jacket and ‘desert boots’. Love at first sight! He was out of character with 99% of the student body at good ole SWTSU and that intrigued me.
We met the next afternoon and for many afternoons and evenings after that. George told me I was intelligent and set about giving me ‘lessons’ on the world’s best books to read, science and political theories, music, movies… We drank coffee in the evenings at the truck stop where we talked until I had to be back in the dorm at 9pm. He took me to Austin to meet his SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) friends and for a weekend at his grandparents abandoned farm house. I was mesmerized and in love.
I spent the summer break reading Kafka, Camus, Dostoevsky, and letters of love and devotion from George. When the next college year finally began, George met me to say he was not returning. He had met someone in Austin. He asked me to marry him and have children hinting that if I didn’t, he would with this girl. I never regretted saying ‘no.’ After all, hadn’t he told me I should learn and experience everything I could?
I believe your first true love is your best love. I’ll never forget him though we lost touch, or the way he encouraged me to think and explore my capabilities. That was not a thing women got from men back then. I’m sure my life has been much richer because of his influence.
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