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6 minute read Members-only

Following Frank

Photo by Gina Easley
Photo by Gina Easley

By Kristin Ohlson

This article was originally published in the online magazine “Full Grown People” in March of 2022 (a totally normal time), and has been lightly edited from its original version.


I first saw Frank when I was twelve, a jittery small-town California girl starting my first week at a public school on the weedy edge of town after six years at tiny St. Thomas Elementary School. My mother had always packed me a mortifyingly wholesome lunch, and I was still adjusting to eating state-approved meals. I was in the cafeteria line, thinking less about the sulfurous vats ahead than about where I would sit with my tray. Then I beheld this boy on the other side of the counter helping the lunch ladies, wearing a hair net and smock just as they did. I experienced my first sexual swoon, my brain lighting up with the astounding and unprecedented words, “I want to kiss him.”

Not that I had never fallen in love before. Since the age of three, I had been in love with my cousin Judy’s husband Pete;. I’m sure every girl or gay boy was in love with him. He was as handsome as a movie star (think George Maharis, but laughing instead of smoldering), always kind, and the star of the summer lake scene. He once jumped from the top of a boathouse in a tuxedo to land on one ski and slalom merrily away from a wedding, a ten-foot watery rooster tail bursting in his wake.

But I never desired Pete; I just adored him. I had yet to desire any boys in my short life. I hardly noticed them unless I wanted to beat them at some game. A few had crushes on me: A boy named Clifton sat near me in second grade and pointed to a picture of a pot of honey in a book and then gestured at me, suggesting that I was sweet. A boy named Jimmy — he looked just like The Little Prince, which was not an asset — gave me a necklace and took me to the movies (with his parents) in the third grade. But I was dedicated to horses and books and searching for arrowheads and buried temples. I wasn’t interested in boys or even flattered by their attention.

But that vision of Frank flipped a switch. I tried to spot him when we were outside for recess — there were eight classrooms each for seventh and eighth grade, and he was in the eighth-grade wing — and observed him from behind the curtain of my friends. His dark hair was on the long side before long hair was a countercultural totem, and he was skinny (pretty much everyone was skinny in the early 1960s). He might not have been as shy as I was, but he seemed quiet and nice. He looked unvarnished by money and expectation, which appealed to me and, maybe, set a pattern for life. My parents were among the more monied families in our little agricultural town, and it was a constant source of discomfort. Frank was different from the boys my parents would later urge me toward, boys who had been given everything and still hungered for more.

I couldn’t help talking about him to my friends, and they couldn’t help teasing me. When my friend Kimmie and I rode my horse, me in front and her behind, she’d nuzzle the back of my neck and croon, “It’s Frank!” When my friends and I danced into the sunshine of recess, they’d sing out his name, knowing that would make me bolt back into the shade. I’m sure he had some inkling that there was this seventh-grade girl who was crazy about him, but the more I pined for him, the more terrifying his presence was. My friends finally approached him and set up a rendezvous that was supposed to take place in one of the hallways during recess, but I panicked and hid in one of the bathroom stalls until long after the bell rang.

And that was that. However much (or little!) his interest had been piqued, it was clear that getting to know me was too much trouble. I think I stopped talking about him to my friends, and they stopped teasing me. He graduated from middle school and went on to high school. I went on to boarding school and off to a college across the country and wound up living in Cleveland for forty years. 

I never saw him again.

Until I found him on Facebook a few months ago during a bout of procrastination, looking up girl friends from long ago — including a clever mean girl who made my life miserable off and on — a few old boyfriends, and Frank. And there he was, fifty-eight years later, still in the Sacramento Valley near our hometown, still pretty freaking cute despite the inevitable weathering. But now a Trump supporter; now with a wife who looks like a blonde, toned Fox News host; now an insurance agent.

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