Bruce Cameron

May 29, 20130

Editor’s Note: The following column was originally published in 2008.

When she was 18 years old, my daughter met the love of her life, the person who changed her life forever and without whom, she informed me, she simply couldn’t live. I sometimes wonder whatever happened to that guy.

I was “cool to the concept” of her having a serious boyfriend the way liquid nitrogen is “cool to the touch.” In other words, when my brain absorbed the idea of a serious boyfriend, it froze and shattered.

I suppose I knew that when young women go to college they often form what could euphemistically be called “adult” relationships, but in my daughter’s case, I comforted myself in the knowledge that I had ordered her not to.

“She’s probably in her dorm room right now,” I’d whisper, calming myself at midnight on a Friday. “Big test Monday morning. Needs her rest.” Secure in my denial, I’d call her cellphone to wake her up to tell her I was glad she was getting a good night’s sleep.

“I can’t come to the phone right now!” her recorded voice greets me. “If it’s Friday, I’m at the big party at the Sigma Chi house! And if it’s Saturday, who knows!”

Ha, ha, that’s my daughter, always kidding. “It’s Dad. Good idea to turn off your phone so you can rest on a Friday before a big test Monday,” I praise her. “Don’t do it again.”

Late into her first year, my daughter called me to tell me about this boyfriend, who had a name something like Pat Crumplefungus. That may not be it, exactly, but I do recall that the first name was the type that can be used for a girl, under some circumstances, so maybe it was “Florence” or “Rachel.”

I drove down to her school to go to dinner with my daughter and Rachel or Muffy or whatever his name was, determined to be open-minded and fair and treat him as I would the Ebola virus.

I don’t know what I expected him to look like physically, though I suppose I was hoping he wouldn’t be so large that I couldn’t fit his body into the trunk of my car when I went to dump him in the river.

My daughter, though, is a trim, muscular athlete — I guess I thought that Muffy or Priscilla or whatever his name was would be a football player, and reasoned that if I were going to get physical with him I would need to offset his presumed superior strength by making my attack cowardly and underhanded.

But Priscilla or Annabelle or whatever his name was turned out to be a wisp of a boy, so pale I could see straight through his skin to his circulatory system. His spidery fingers nervously plucked at his sparse mustache, which looked as if it had been manufactured by silk worms, and his blue eyes were washed out and milky, like a fish peering out of a cloudy aquarium.

The boyfriend was a Marxist, though he sniffed when he said it, contemptuous of Marx for not going far enough. He loftily informed me that real artists don’t get paid, implying that by having a column in a newspaper I was selling out and, come the revolution, would be hanged for it.

While he spoke my daughter gazed at him rapturously, at one point leaning in to nibble at his ear in such a fashion as to cause my hand to fall flat on the table, loud as a pistol shot.

When I said goodbye to my daughter later that day, I told her I’d always pictured her with someone more masculine and less like a squid. She took offense for some reason, so our farewells were rather strained. Driving home I was gripped with a convulsive perplexity, strong as an appendicitis. What was she doing with this guy? He could not have been less like me if he tried!

Fortunately, the serious boyfriend eventually leaked out of his clothing and evaporated — at least, that’s what I pictured, because we gradually stopped talking about Annabelle or Barbie or whatever his name was.

Fine by me. For some reason, I never liked the boy.

(Bruce Cameron is a syndicated columnist and author and has a website at http://www.wbrucecameron.com.)