Girl Next Door

     Sheila lived three houses away growing up, and spent most of her time in the company of my sisters, Jackie and Joann.  Family birthdays, holidays, and days ending in a Y, she was usually around, and considered an extended part of our family.  Take away the fighting and teasing, Sheila treated me like her own brother.  Like the time she left me stranded in a windstorm, laughing from the safety of our house, as a metal trash barrel knocked over my scrawny six year old self in the middle of the street.  Or when she banned me from playing in that odd dollhouse shed of hers in her backyard.  No matter.  It was contaminated with a powerful batch of cooties anyway.  Just a year older than me, Sheila certainly was pretty enough to meet the superficial standards of my hormone-inflamed teenage years.  But unlike the teenage movie genre of the John Hughes era, girl-next-door romances rarely unfold.  And she was like my sixth sister anyway.  Plus, she was a redhead.
     Had Bruce Springsteen written "Red Headed Woman", an X-rated song about his wife, earlier in his career, then I may have reassessed my perspective on the attractiveness of redheads.  But brunettes were always first on my list, blondes were second, while redheads never made it on the same page.  I admit I paid close attention to Tawny Kitaen's body-waxing of a Jaguar in that Whitesnake video on MTV in the '80s.  But that was about it.
     During a ten day hospital stay five years ago, I awoke to someone gently squeezing my foot.  It was Sheila, R.N.  It could have been the painkillers.  Or maybe it was her in her nursing scrubs.  Or maybe it was just the sight of a welcomed, familiar face.  Whatever it was, Sheila looked ten times better standing at my bedside than Tawny Kitaen ever did sprawled out over a car.  She didn't look like a sister to me at all, but someone who, as Bruce would say, I could have my tires rotated by.
     Recently I sat at the kitchen table of Sheila's parents.  Bob saw and heard my disbelief when he described Sheila's sense of humor.
     "It's true. She'll do anything for a laugh" Bob says.  "She's subtle about it, but she really is a total goofball."
     Goofball?  Sheila?  No way, I said.  I love that, I thought.
     Mary's pride focused on Sheila's compassionate and altruistic side:  The hundreds of sick patients who considered her their "favorite nurse".  How she made all her patients' hospital stay comfortable and fun.  The time she arranged and granted a terminally ill man, held bound in his hospital bed for weeks, one final wish. He attended his grandson's college graduation, while sitting in the front row.  He died three days later.
     "And she did it all on her own" Mary says.  "On her own time, without any recognition."
     Charitable?  Humble? Caring?  Sheila?  The girl who left me to to perish amongst the flying trashcans? That Sheila? Wow.  Simply awesome.
     Damn Springsteen, I thought driving home afterwards.  If only he had married Patti the first time around.