My experience was different thoughout the teenage heartbreak firefight years. It amounted to episodes of great girls (which I certainly didn’t deserve) demonstrating an interest in me and me either missing the signals or fleeing in terror. I can remember when I was turning 11, my mother made the politically foolish mistake of requiring me to pass out invitations to my birthday party. The tomboy in my class (tough Terri) got an automatic invitation because “she was cool”, and also pointedly assured me that she would whip my ass good on the playground if she wasn’t invited. I also gave one to my friend’s sister because she shared my interest in model railroading. They were the only girls invited, but before I could escape the school grounds a pretty girl with whom I can’t remember a single conversation, cornered me in a hallway and administered the humiliating verbal equivalent of the beating promised by Terri. It was awful, but she was magnificent in her rage, red as a beet, lightning flashing from her large grey eyes. I stood there, riveted as the list of invectives on my shortcomings spewed from her volcano of a mouth climaxed by a debilitating kick to my shin, then a twirl on her heel to march away down the hall. I arrived home to find my sisters nearly in tears from laughingly relating my adventure to my mother, who upon the news of her child’s embarrassing humiliation, pointed to the kitchen table and said to me “You don’t have the sense that God gave that toaster”.