A TALE OF GREYHOUNDS AND TRAMPOLINES

     On a Greyhound returning from New Jersey to Champaign, Ill., after Christmas break. A young woman boards at Pittsburgh carrying a small suitcase and, negotiating the narrow aisle, scans her options. 

      She slows, ignores an ample selection of seats, and softly asks, “Anyone here?”

      Certainly not. 

      She is beautiful and blonde and smiley, and, giddy in the newness of it all, we pay absolutely no attention as the tedious farmlands of Ohio and Indiana roll by, still scarred by the brown, sere dregs of last year’s crops.

      She is from the Deep South and has changed buses in Pittsburgh, headed back to Grinnell College. I learn about her family, her favorite classes, her dreams of med school. Bound for the University of Illinois, I am but an ink-stained wretch who covers major sports at the Daily Illini, without a declared major and devoid of lofty dreams.

      When we arrive in the middle of a downstate Illinois cornfield, she marvels at the size of my campus. It has 45,000 students, compared to Grinnell’s 1,650. 

      "Show me around, and I can catch a later bus,” she offers.

      Things are growing very dreamy.

      A walking tour of the quadrangle, followed by bratwursts and beers at Stan Wallace’s campus hangout, then to the basement offices of the Daily Illini. My newspaper buddies, who had been privately pondering my celibacy, are hugely impressed.

      Six sweet hours later at the tiny campus bus station, Sharon Hollister leans in for a hug and a chaste kiss (it was the ‘50s, after all), and boards a Greyhound to Iowa. We correspond briefly; I never see her again.

      Jump ahead two decades:

      My wife and I and our daughters vacation two weeks each summer in a rented log cabin in Maine. On the outskirts of Boothbay Harbor, on the lone country road into town, sits a small trailer park with a large sign: “Hollister’s Trampolines.”

      Over the years I have driven past it a hundred times, always engaging my silent musings.

      — Can my long-ago Sharon possibly have any connection with this lonely scar in a forest of Maine pines? 

      No, Hollister is not an uncommon name.

      — But as a journalist, shouldn’t I be curious enough to stop and see?

      You are a married man with two lovely daughters. It is untoward to fixate on a shooting star that streaked your horizon 20 years ago. She wouldn’t even recall that day. Only you thought it dreamy.

      — You’re right. It’s stupid. Besides, she spoke of med school. How mortifying if I discovered her dream buried in scruffy see-saws and trampolines in Nowheresville, U.S.A.

      Yet, one day, alone in the car after years of mentally juggling “should I or shouldn’t I” and ignoring my own wise counsel, I park and walk up three steps into the trailer. 

      “Sharon Hollister?” I ask the guy at the desk.

      “Sharon Hollister sold this to me last month,” he replies.

      Noticing my sudden declension in spirits, he adds, “I don’t know where she went.”

      My Sharon?

      I’ll never know.

Ronald E. Cohen, a journalist, also was an executive at United Press International and Gannett News Corp. in Washington