The High School Crush (satire)

She wasn't my girlfriend. In fact, she turned me down completely. Yet I had this crush on her that began in Grade 11 and ended after graduating high school.

It has been almost 40 years since then. Since then I have not felt the same feelings felt when a cute, curly haired young woman led me to have a crush on her almost four decades ago.

Rachel Edwards (not her name) was a cheerful, bubbly 16 year old, who ended up going to Aldergrove High School in 1975 due to a slight change in catchments. The following year, the boundaries changed once again, and we ended up graduating at different schools, with me at Aldergrove and her, Langley Secondary School.

An expert at playing the flute, Rachel was talented. She also was anti-capital punishment. At one point in her artistic career, she painted a mural on the side of the Aldergrove Park swimming pool building.

If I were to name the only thing positive that came out of this one-sided relationship, then it would be that I learned that my view on love is often limited and not as rich as anyone else's. Perhaps this is due to an early mild traumatic brain injury at age 2.

It is difficult to tell what has caused me to be so unlucky at love. Most likely, I fear commitment, so much of my later sex life consisted of short liaisons with willing women and a lot of premarital sex.

Even the apparently committed relationships were relatively short-lived trysts, some of them romantic but most of them lasting less than a year.

Today I am coming on to my 56th year, and wonder what happened to Rachel. Did she get married? Or, was her sex life as short-lived as mine? Perhaps her life was richer than mine in experience but the job was tiresome, being nursing.

I will never know, because Rachel's number remains unlisted. I am sure that I never loved her, and that much of that relationship was as close to becoming like a obsessive romantic as anyone might get.

Though, my recent change in religious denomination is a stark contrast to my life before Mormon, from late teens as hopeless romantic to confirmed bachelor.

Even so, I am grateful to you, Rachel Edwards, because you agreed to exchange letters with me. I am sorry for sending your letters back without stamps. Thanks for putting up with me.

By the way, I truly miss you.

Concerned Citizen Does the Right Thing for Bullied Student

A report from an Ontario doctor's wife comes from a currently undisclosed website in a comment thread about how to protect children from cyber-bullying.

She helped one of her patients, 14 year old girl who was bullied at school.

When she called the school, she got the run-around: the secretary said she didn't go there, after being asked three times to look for her.

When the doctor's wife talked to the principal in charge of the girl, the principal had never heard of her. The guidance counselor had sent her to a psychiatric community centre for counseling.

The girl's time at the centre got her into trouble - her words were used against her.
As a result, the mother nearly lost both her children to Children's Aid.

So the doctor's wife took her out of school since it was May. Then she filed a complaint against the unregistered mental health worker at CA.

As for the girl, she finished her school year at home.

Later, the woman's husband went with her to their MPP to protest the neglect going on in that girl's school and the use of entrapment to threaten the child's mother.

My guess is, the mother of the child was a single mother on welfare. Also it appears that in response to the bullying, the school's guidance counselor wrongly guessed the girl had a psychiatric problem.

It's more likely the school bullies had influential parents and that factored strongly on the outcome for this child.