I was in third grade the first time I fell in love. A crushing, choking kind of love that left me speechless and trembling, hiding behind the lunchboxes under the bench in the coat room. And though, for the life of me, I can’t remember the name of the teacher I spent 5 days a week with, I’ll forever remember the name Mike Donahue.

He was a sixth grader, cool, composed and ultra-popular, and me? I was a frightened bunny, always scouting an exit and ready to bolt at a moments notice. But, oh, how I pined for him. Many a recess was spent sitting on top of that strange metal contraption. You remember the one…the ½ sphere set in the ground, that you could climb on, or over, or hide beneath when the urge would strike. But I never hid. I would perch myself on top, and pretend as hard as I could that I was aloof, and important, and precious…all the time stealing glances toward the blacktop where he played basketball, or tether ball, or just leaned, ever so handsome, against the side of the red brick building. I remember this, as clear as it was yesterday, and I can still feel that sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach, knowing how far our worlds were apart. My first love, and my first, want that for which I cannot have. I vaguely remember a time or two when he chased me round the swing set, and the way it set my heart on wings; to be noticed, to be acknowledged. To run and laugh until my breath was gone and my cheeks were set rosy by the whip of the wind and the pain of my shyness.

At the end of the year, after many days of stress and worry, I finally worked up the nerve to ask him to sign my autograph book. Which may or may not be true, for as the years have passed I can’t recall if I actually asked, or if he, knowing the effect he had on me, asked if he could sign it. But I do remember the signature. And I do remember the way I so carefully dog-eared the page in a slightly different way then all the rest, so that I could find it on a moments notice. And I do remember tracing the flowing lines of the letters with my third grade index finger, and thinking how close I felt to being someone at that moment. And oh, the hearts I would trace with my finger, around and around. Never daring to defile the actual page with lead or ink…it was enough to imagine it there, to know it could have been there.

Many years later, my sister ran into him on the campus of MSU. Now “Dr.” Donahue, and she reminisced, and laughed, and caught up on years that had passed, and then, and then…he asked about me. He said he could still remember how everyday he would find me in the lunchroom, and come to say hello. He said he knew he could count on three things. I would never make eye contact, I would blush a bright red, and I would always offer him the dessert my mother had packed in my lunchbox. He said he always thought I was cute, in a third grade sort of way, and that my incredibly excruciating shyness was endearing. Almost as endearing as my willingness to hand over my ho-ho’s and twinkies, and cookies, and ding-dongs.

And though now, I can sort of somewhere come up with a hazy recollection of that lunch time routine, until she mentioned it to me, I had completely forgotten. And I guess, in a way, it just goes to show, that not only will a girl never fully outgrow a case of the bashful’s, but if she’s the type to, as a third grader, give and give and give, just on the off chance that it will make someone like her, she probably always will be.