Th4 following is the first of  three vignettes mirroring the introductory lyrics.

It Never Occurred to Me

It never occurred to me

 that you might refer to me

as someone you used to know.

It never occurred to me

that you might refer to me

 in somebody else’s arms.

Never thought I’d live to see the day

that you’d pass me by.

It never occurred to me …

‘til now.  

                                                                      The Four Freshmen

Jimmy and Kay

That can’t be her!  he thought, as she walked toward him.  His eyes weren’t so good anymore, but they didn’t create images that weren’t there – anymore.  Jimmy sat on a park bench along Chicago’s Outer Drive, across from the Grant Park band shell.  He could feel the breeze off the lake against his back.  He hadn’t seen Kay in nearly fifty years.  She passed by, even glanced at him, and kept on walking slowly. 

“Kay?” he called.  She stopped, and listened as though she thought she heard something but wasn’t sure.  “Kay”, he called again, and rose from the bench.  She turned.

“Are you calling me?” she asked, hesitantly. 

“It’s me, Kay.  It’s Jimmy.”

“Oh my God”, she took a breath and put her hand to her mouth.  “Oh my God, Jimmy!”

In the late 50s, when a large bohemian community thrived on Chicago’s Near North side, Jimmy and Kay had been a couple.  They lived in a squalid flat above the retail stores along Chicago Avenue, and drank coffee and did drugs in the dark, smoky coffee houses that dotted the area.  Jimmy was a poet.  He often read in those places and gained some measure of recognition.  Kay was his girl.  They were everything that respectable people suspected and feared of the beatniks who embarrassed, them hanging out on the streets in daylight.  They were advocates and practitioners of free love and free anything else they could lay their hands on.  They picked up occasional work as dishwashers and other menial jobs as they needed to survive.   

They never talked of marriage.  Kay couldn’t even remember either having said “I love you”, in their four years together.  But they were as committed to each other as anyone was in the subculture.   

“Kay, can you come sit a minute with me?”

She continued to stare at him, unbelieving. 

“Kay?”

“Oh, Jimmy, I’m sorry.  I just can’t believe my eyes.  It’s really you.”

“Come sit with me, Kay.”

“Of course.”

They moved to Jimmy’s bench and sat down.  Kay pulled her collar up.  It was a relatively mild, early September day in Chicago.  Still the breeze off the lake was chilly. 

“You look wonderful, Kay.  The years have been good to you.”

“Life has been good to me, Jimmy.  You look…”

“ ‘Old’, say it.  I don’t mind the truth.  Life has been good to me, too.  But I’m sure our ideas of ‘good’ are very different”, he smiled.

“No, you look as if you’ve lived in the outdoors.  Like a hunter or rancher.”

Jimmy laughed.  “Thank you, Kay.  I have lived in the outdoors - on the streets of Chicago.  Not homeless, mind you.  But I’ve spent many years working on the streets – reading, protesting, striking.  I really never gave up the ideals we had fifty years ago, although they evolved considerably.  Tell me about your life, Kay.  Family?  Career?”

“Both, actually.  You taught me to love books and poetry and literature.  I have been a librarian.  Actually I just retired from the library at the University of Chicago.  After we went our own ways, I went to school.  I started at Lincoln Community College and eventually finished at U of I - Chicago.  I even earned a ‘masters’ at Chicago while I worked in the library.

“Husband, three kids.  Still together after forty-five years - with my husband, that is.  We live in Hyde Park.  My husband, Chuck Merritt, is an administrator at the university.  He should have retired, but he loves his work and has no pastimes to occupy him in retirement.  So he works and I read and walk this wonderful lakefront.

“And you, Jimmy? 

“No husband”, he smiled, “no kids – no wife either.  I’ve had girls, or course, but none could compare with you.  We had something special, Kay.  We should have got married.  But, then, nobody did – not in the ‘beat generation’, anyway.  I never found anyone I wanted to make a commitment to.  And no one every found me who wanted to make a commitment.  I’ve not exactly been a prize.” 

“Lots of drugs and booze.  Although I’ve been clean for twenty years, or more.  I’ve published some, not enough to get much attention, but nice things – a couple of book-length collections.  I’ve taught a little, from time to time.  I’ve been around the world, more or less.  I’ve worked on fishing boats in Alaska, crewed on a tanker or two.” 

“Do you see any of the old crowd, Jimmy?”

“No, Kay.  Mostly they’re dead.  Drugs and booze won out.  Most of them just couldn’t get it together and went to seed – brains burned up, killed in fights in dingy rooming houses.”

“Oh, Jimmy.  How awful!” she said.

“Yeah, looking at it from here it is.  But at the time it didn’t seem so bad.  At least to them.  Drugs and liquor can mask a whole lot.”

“But you survived.  You got clean.  How?”

“Just lucky.  I can’t point to anything particular.  I wanted to write and I knew from time to time that I had to be sober to do that, at least to have my work looked at by any publisher.  I guess that’s what saved me.”

“You could have been a great poet, Jimmy.”

“What’s a great poet, Kay?  I am a great poet.  It’s just that the world doesn’t know it.  I’m a great poet because I’m free to write what’s in my heart.  I’m free to write of my experience of life, of my experiences in life, of my hopes and disappointments, of you, of us.  I’m not bound by the strictures of some academic role or of some publisher’s guidelines or expectations.  I’m a pure poet, because I don’t have to earn a living with my work.  I’m a pure poet because I can’t earn a living from my work.”

“It sounds like not much has changed in the last fifty years, Jimmy.”

“Only the accidentals, Kay.  I’m pretty much the same me.  I’m just fatter and older and sicker.  I haven’t learned that I can’t change the world.  And I haven’t given up hope, in spite of politicians and wars and stupid people who control our culture – your culture anyway.  No one controls my culture – because I don’t have one.  Or if I do, it changes day to day.  No one controls it but me.”

“Where do you live, Jimmy?”

“Here.  You’re sitting in my living room.  This is my bench.”

“You’re homeless? she gasped.”

“No.  I’m on the street.  This is my home.  Look around, Kay.  You just said it, this is a beautiful lakefront.  I don’t have to look at a picture to enjoy it.  Or leave to home, as you do, to enjoy it.  I live in it.”

“And now you’ve made my day by letting me see you and visit with you.  It’s so good to see you.  You bring back a whole lot of wonderful memories, Kay”, Jimmy said, smiling again.  “I’ll fall asleep tonight thinking of you and of us.  I have thought of you often over the years, Kay.  I guess I was really in love with you.  I just didn’t know it, or know how to recognize it, or how to express it.  Probably I was so conformist to our nonconformist life that I couldn’t allow myself to acknowledge it.  It wouldn’t have been ‘cool’.  Still, you gave me that and I’ve carried it with me.  Thank you, Kay, for that – for us. 

“Oh God, Jimmy.  You shame me.  I’ve rarely thought of us all these years.  I ran away from who and what we were.”  A tear caught in Kay’s throat. 

“That’s wonderful, Kay, you needn’t be ashamed.  I’m glad you were able to put us behind you.  That’s what you needed.   That was appropriate to your life.  Mine was different.  My need was different.  I would hope that you can find happiness in knowing what you gave me.   You’re leaving us behind does not, in the least, diminish my pleasure in what we had – who we were.

“You could have been so good, Jimmy.  You could have been a great teacher, a famous poet.  You could have had a great life.”

He took her hands in his.  They were soft and warm.  He looked in her eyes.

“Kay.  Don’t do this.  I am a great poet.  I just told you that.  And I’ve enjoyed my life.  I wouldn’t have wanted to be like your husband, who I’m sure is a wonderful man.  I’m me.  I was always me.  I’ve lived a life appropriate to me.  Please, Kay, don’t diminish my life just because you’re can’t imagine living it, because you can’t imagine it’s the life I wanted.  You stain my life by not accepting it.”

Kay looked at her watch.  Seeing her former lover this way, a homeless bum, and hearing him pretend it’s the way he wanted to live, was too much for her.  She was terribly sad, on the verge of a real cry.  She needed to get away.  And it was time to head back to Hyde Park.  She took her hands back.

“Jimmy, I’ve got to go.  Chuck will be expecting me.”

“You’re beautiful, Kay, as you always were.  It’s been so good to see you and talk with you.  I’m so glad you have a love and a family.  It’s what you needed and deserved.”

Barely able to hold back her tears, she kissed him on the cheek.  “Goodbye, Jimmy.  God bless you.”

She rose and walked quickly in the direction of the South Shore commuter train station.  As she turned from him, she could no longer hold back the sobs.  What a horrible waste, she thought.  He was a gentle, generous man.  He deserved better.

Jimmy watched her walk away.  He truly was happy to see her.  He was happy that she’d had the life she wanted.  The days of the beat generation and their life together began to return to his mind like a picture album.  It excited him to see them together as the pages turned.  He could almost feel her warmth in his arms again.  He took pleasure in reliving those nights of high ideals and freedom and being part of something new and important.  He closed his smiling eyes, intent on dreaming of them together again, young and spirited and free, as he dozed on his bench.

She’d never know that they picked him up after nightfall; another homeless guy who died on the chilly streets of Chicago.  Good place to go, though, on that beautiful lakefront, watching the sun set over the Michigan Avenue skyline.