Until I finish more of the Mahasraya story, here's something I wrote about my real first love, F. Komatar. I'm working on other bits of my life story in tandem with writing about Mahasraya.

I remember the first time I saw F. Komatar. I was in 7th grade and we had an assembly in the gym. We all sat in the bleachers and Mr. Komatar demonstrated how one could train a dog effectively, using his own Doberman to illustrate his methods. I was amazed, being a dog lover, and enjoyed his presentation immensely. He had a great sense of humor which spiced up his presentation.

The following year I was in Mr. Komatar’s Earth Science class. Earth science was one of my favorite subjects because it involved geology and I had always been passionate about collecting rocks. My mother used to joke that she could never wash my pants without checking the pockets for rocks I picked up on my many strolls through the woods.

In my first conversation with Mr. Komatar, I asked him a question about something I had read, about how one could get used to wearing lenses that turned the images they perceived upside down and after just a few days their eyes would compensate and the images would turn right side up for them. If they took off the lenses they’d have to adjust all over again. He explained how this worked, drawing a diagram for me.

Gradually we became better acquainted and I began to hang out after school in the science room where Mr. Komatar spent every afternoon. A few of the geeky boys in our class also started hanging out, and Mr. Komatar also supervised detentions. That was the year I began my spiritual journey and I started going to different churches with friends, trying to find a spiritual home for myself. Eventually I settled on the Catholic Church and this dismayed Mr. Komatar, who began to debate with me about my new beliefs, especially after I started to take lessons with a priest from a local parish, Father Kempker.

I remember Mr. Komatar talking about the Spanish Inquisition and questioning whether popes could really be infallible. I also remember him challenging me to find anywhere in the New Testament where Jesus said directly that he was God. I was unable to do so. Along the way we discussed other faiths and philosophies—Mormonism, existentialism and others. I began to live for the time after school when I would see F., as I began to think of him, and at some point I realized I was in love. I remember that I loved his sense of humor most of all, and we played off each other well, zinging one liners back and forth like a tennis match. Sometimes we even kept score. We played chess together throughout the day on an improvised board upon which I put strips of masking tape with the initials of each chess piece, enabling us to keep track of the game while I carried the board around with me.

Sometimes, on rainy days, F. would drive me home in his little sports car, a VW Karman Ghia. Just like the song, “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” by the Police, his car was “warm and dry,” and to a teenage girl, imbued with the sexual intimacy I longed for. My fantasies grew quite detailed and every love song I listened to fed my growing obsession with F. I grew so absorbed in him that I remember my Uncle Ted (my Aunt Gin’s boyfriend} had a talk with me urging me to be careful and warning me that I could get hurt. He was obviously concerned that the relationship would become sexual.

For my part, I couldn’t really tell what F. thought of our relationship, whatever it was. It was clearly more than the normal teacher and student relationship. I remember the term “platonic” coming up in conversation, but it certainly wasn’t on my side.

At home my mother was in the depths of depression. She had tried to kill herself with an overdose of pills during the summer between 7th and 8th grades, when I was visiting my grandparents. She was home during the day but was unable to cook or clean. For days at a time she would be in the same dirty nightgown. Bathing had become a monumental task she felt unable to take on. She lived on sandwiches, cookies, and cigarettes. I remember her sitting all the time with her dogs on her lap, smoking and reading or watching tv. Mom put on over 60 pounds that winter. I was so uncomfortable watching her, not fully understanding depression or how it incapacitated her, so when I was home I stayed in my room most of the time. I would read and listen to music. I didn’t have a phone so when I called my friends I had to do so from a pay phone or the neighbors’ house. With all of this going on I was desperately clinging to the distraction that F. provided.

One day F. said that he was going to attend a basketball game. One of my girlfriends and I decided to go as well. By this time all my close friends and possibly the entire class knew that I had a “crush” on F. That evening we went to the game and there he was—with his wife Margaret and their two children, F. Jr. and Beth. For me it was a rude awakening because I didn’t really want to think about his wife or marriage, much less his children. I don’t think I really expected that he would be leaving his wife and running off into the sunset with me. I didn’t think past being in his arms, which I was sure would be the ultimate bliss. Of course that’s the immaturity of a 14 year old. But I also remember being very frustrated that just because of that immaturity my feelings wouldn’t be regarded as being real, but rather they would be dismissed as “just a crush.” I knew that my feelings were real and that the reasons I loved Frank were not trivial or imagined. I knew Frank, I had spent hours learning what he believed, how he saw the world, what he stood for, and my feelings were based on this knowledge. I was not experiencing a crush on a film star where I imagined I knew what that person was like. I knew—and therefore I loved.

The relationship was all the more confusing for me because I sensed that there was some feeling on his part as well, but it was never made clear. Even then I could appreciate that the position of being a teacher and a husband made it impossible to reveal openly, but I hoped for a private revelation that I would have taken to my grave. I longed to pierce the veil and discover what I hoped and believed was true—that my feelings were returned to some degree, however slight. While this never happened, we continued to spend a great deal of time together. It was one of those crazy-making situations that make you doubt your own perceptions. Coming from a fatherless home I desperately needed to feel wanted—and yet I was never able to feel secure about F’s affections.

Inevitably summer came and brought about an abrupt separation. I spent the summer working and trying to lose weight. F. had dropped enough hints about my weight problem that I felt very self conscious about it and couldn’t help but feel that it was one of the barriers between us. Perhaps I imagined that if I could only get thin enough and pretty enough I would break through his reserve and receive the impassioned declaration of love I so longed for.

I lost over twenty pounds that summer and reached the weight of 150 pounds. No matter how I starved myself I couldn’t seem to get any lower.

Somehow I had found out F’s home address in a nearby town, Hamilton, across the border in Illinois. I decided to walk over there and try to see him. I was also curious to see his wife and family again. So that’s exactly what I did.

I arrived to find them in their yard. Of course they were surprised to see me. I suspect the best thing they could have done is to set a clear boundary for me and send me right back home, perhaps calling my mother to come and get me. That would have been, finally, a clear message. Instead, I was allowed to spend the day with them. F. left for awhile, something to do with his car, and I got to know his wife better. To my dismay I liked her, and at my urging she told the story of how she and F. met in college, and how F. won out over another man who was interested in her.

Later he returned and we all had dinner before I walked home. At one point he was teasing me and I objected, and he turned and asked his daughter Beth, “Why do I tease you?”

“Because you love me,” she replied.

I was startled, to say the least. Was this his oblique way of telling me that he loved me? Perhaps like a daughter, if not in the way I wished? As always, it was an ambiguous message to say the least.

So I went home puzzled but ecstatic that I had spent the day seeing how F. lived, meeting his family, and sharing their evening meal. After a summer of not seeing him it was heady stuff.

I continued to spend time with him after school during the next year, ninth grade, but I knew the time would come when I would move on to High school. Once I was in tenth grade I came back to see him a few times. Then I got involved in Krsna consciousness and was too busy.

I guess it’s true that one never forgets one’s first love, because as years passed I never forgot F. When I was in Hamilton visiting my father after the birth of my son I called F. and he came and picked me up. We went to his home for a visit and then he dropped me off at my Aunt Gin’s, coming in briefly to see a picture of my first husband. Later still I came back to live in Keokuk and found out that he had moved to a suburb of Salt Lake City, Utah. I wrote to him and he responded, and we arranged to meet at the train station in Salt Lake where I and my children would be stopping in our journey back to California in 1985. He arrived with his fiancé and son from a second marriage in tow. They brought us ice cream treats and we sat on the grass and talked about old times. They walked us back to the train and he gave me a hug. I asked, as we were hugging, “Will you write to me?” and he said, “You know I will.”

It always seemed to me that F. expected me to just know, to just read his mind somehow. I could never take his feelings or intentions for granted.
For a couple of years we corresponded and occasionally talked on the phone. I tried to keep it light even though being in touch with him again brought all of my old feelings back with a vengeance. I was a single parent during this time and was not really dating anyone. I was preparing to go back to college and was too busy to have time for dating. So it was easy to fall back into fantasizing that somehow Frank and I would end up together. Here he was on his 3rd marriage, to a woman who he’d had an affair with while they both were married to other people. You can imagine what my mind did with that piece of information! It felt like all I had to do was wait this marriage out. Of course I never asked myself if he’d be able to sustain a relationship with me if he’d already had a few failed marriages behind him. I did have to wonder if his inability to talk about his feelings with me was a problem in his other relationships.

I remember talking to him about his kids from his first marriage, F. and Beth. He had been out of touch with them since his first marriage ended and he’d moved from Illinois to Salt Lake. During our correspondence F. Jr. did get in touch with his father and Frank was so excited to be in touch with his son. He tried to re-establish contact with Beth as well but she was more reserved. Knowing my own father had not been in my life for long periods of time he sought my perspective. I remember writing a long letter trying to describe the distrust and fear I felt with regard to my father and what might be going through Beth’s mind. I told him he would have to be patient and persistent if he expected her to regain her trust in his being there for her. He would have to prove himself all over again.

I was shocked that this man I had so respected and looked up to had not sustained an ongoing relationship with his kids. I was so angry at my own father for not being able to stay in touch with me and here was my beloved Frank, behaving the same way. I imagined being away from my own kids and I just couldn’t understand how I would be able to not talk to them for long periods of time. It was just incomprehensible.

Eventually a flirtatious note crept into our letters. I remember at one point he was writing to me while his college students were taking a test and he was describing his thoughts, playfully, and wrote, “…I mean there are three little cupcakes in this class that might just want an A bad enough------see there I go, slap my face.”

I was emboldened by his willingness to make such a joke to me of all people and I finally got up my nerve to ask him what he later referred to as The Question. I asked him, awkwardly I’m sure, if he had been sexually attracted to me when I knew him as a teenager. I suppose I could have simply ask what I meant to him or what the nature of his feelings were instead of posing it as a direct sexual inquiry. Would that have made a difference? I don’t know. In any event, his answer clearly indicated that he did not want to be pinned down. He launched into a strange rap about being known as the Shadow of the Owl or Shadow of the Ghost Owl or something like that, and not revealing himself and so on. I wanted to slap him, I was so frustrated. I mean, answer it or don’t, but don’t lead me down some convoluted path in order to slam the door in the end. A simple, “I don’t feel comfortable answering such a question,” would have been sufficient.

I wrote back a more openly flirtatious letter and sent a poem called “Between The Lines.” A few weeks later I tried to call him once again. He was trying to tell me he couldn’t talk, that his wife’s family was visiting, and I was about to get off the phone when his wife picked up another phone and bitched me out, informing me she had read my letter and wanted me to leave her husband alone and never call there again. My heart sank as F. didn’t say a word, and I hung up. I hadn’t imagined that she would read his mail and hated myself for making such a stupid mistake. I was devastated at being out of touch with him once again.

In the years since I have twice tried to get closure with him. Occasionally I would send him bits of my published writing, since one of the positive things about our friendship was the support and encouragement he gave me with regard to my writing. I had always intended to dedicate my first book to him.

Sometimes I have a dream where once again I am asking him some version of The Question and he is about to answer, finally, once and for all. Only I wake up or we are interrupted before he can speak.

Despite moving on to marry a wonderful man who makes me very happy and never leaves me wondering if I am loved, I still long for closure on this one relationship from my past. I suspect that I will die without a definitive answer to The Question. Like heart disease and migraines, I guess that’s one of the many things I have no control over. Sucks, doesn’t it?

Perhaps at heart I feel like he would answer my question if he had ever truly cared for me in a way that I deserved to be cared for. It’s all water under the bridge now, whether it was appropriate or not, so I can’t help but wonder why, why this determination to with hold a simple answer to a simple question. Does he fear the answer? Is it something he’s never wanted to face or admit to himself?

All I can do is speculate.

This picture of Steve Martin looks a lot like F. Komatar, imagine a less prominent nose and slightly thinner face and more relaxed hair style: http://www.imdb.com/media/rm325163008/nm0000188