This past June marked for me a reunion with a woman whom I had last seen 57 years ago. We happened to find ourselves at the same table among alumni who had accepted our college’s invitation to an outdoor lunch.

When I heard her name, an event in my personal history, long since gone, rose to my consciousness. So did a series of rapid might-have-beens, some of them creating a trajectory for my life radically different from the actual one.

Jean and I first met when our two families introduced us at the home of mutual acquaintances. Our fathers were professional friends, both of them Sunday Editors at Boston Newspapers, mine at the Post, hers at the Globe. Uncharacteristically for him, my father collaborated in this scheme to bring together two young people who were about to enter the same college that fall.

That evening has imprinted itself on my memory so deeply that I can recall the emotional details. If the purpose of the evening was to stir in me interest in this young woman, it worked marvelously well.

She seemed to me alluring, charming, and responsive. Her intelligence and poise impressed me, as did the relationship she had with her parents. Instinctively, I felt this to be a friendship that would notably enhance my experience of college. She was a person I wanted to be in touch with, starting in my freshman year.

The encounter on that evening, thoroughly enjoyable and promising as it was, turned out to be the last time that I ever saw Jean until this past spring. Not once did I attempt to contact her during the rest of the time we spent as college students. Never did we meet or find ourselves in class together.

For my part, the main reason for this failure to follow the gracious action of our two families was my own immaturity. I did not dare to take the initiative to suggest we get together, for fear I would be refused.

At that time I was shy in a way that would surprise friends who have known me only in middle and later life. Simply calling a young woman on the telephone was enough to make me cringe, again because I envisioned being turned down.

I remember spending weekend evenings in my college room, lonely for company, but fearful of making a fool of myself if I tried and failed of acceptance. To some extent that fear applied to my approach to fellow males, but much more to members of the other gender.

As I came to analyze the situation later, the main issue was uneasiness focused on my arm. Having suffered a birth injury that resulted in my left arm being noticeably shorter and weaker than my right one, I felt this physical distortion to make me unattractive to women.

Just as I used to cringe at seeing my bodily profile reflected in department store’s three-way mirror, so I imagined women would feel about association with me. Irrational as this assumption may sound, it was enough to limit severely my social initiatives in those days of later adolescence.

This history was also complicated by my growing sense of being called to a religious vocation that would require celibacy. Half-way through my college career, this feeling led to my entering into a monastery-like setting that prepared me for eventual ordination to the priesthood.

In brief summary of a complicated interior situation, this double rationale on my part explains why nothing ever came of a meeting that seemed to promise more. And it explains why 57 years would pass before Jean and I met again.

How she feels about the situation, I do not know. In conversation this spring we nostalgically recalled the meeting so long ago but drew no moral from it. Undoubtedly, it looms as much less important for her than for me. She did not have so much emotional baggage, I strongly suspect, as did I.

My chief judgment on this event is appreciation of living long. Having done so myself has given me the scope to change radically. The decades have allowed me to mature, to put behind me the basic insecurities of the past. No longer do I fear rejection because of the defects that I recognize in myself.

Later life has brought me an acceptance of my bodily self far different from that of earlier days. Now I feel disability to be standard for human beings, something we are all heir to. Those of us who do not have disabilities early on manage to acquire them later. And I have discovered that women friends, when they notice mine, do not mind at all.

Being so far removed from the foolishness of youth gladdens me now. Granted that I am hardly free of foolishness in later life, it strikes me as different and less threatening. The misgivings that prevented me from pursuing a friendship so long ago no longer have such a hold on me, thanks to time and the startling changes it brings.

Richard Griffin