The other night my daughter called me with excitement in her voice as she blurted out, “You’re not going to believe what happened at school today!”
“What?” I asked with interest, assuming she was talking about the grade school her two young boys attend.
“Riley (my 9-year-old grandson) got himself a girlfriend!” exclaimed my daughter.
“You’re kidding.”
“No I’m not! And when I went to pick him up, that’s all he and his teacher could talk about.”
“I didn’t even know Riley was interested in girls,” I said.
“Well, as I understand it, a little girl in his class more or less made Riley her boyfriend, although he was apparently a very willing conquest.”
“What did she do?” I asked.
“She basically just started holding hands with him, although according to their teacher, somewhere along the line Riley got kissed.”
“Riley kissed a girl?” I asked in amazement.
“Well, I think it was more her kissing him than him kissing her, but their lips definitely ended up together. Plus according to Riley, there was apparently a kiss on the forehead involved, too. Now one kiss seems pretty harmless, but if we’re talking about two or more, then good heavens, that’s getting pretty close to making out. Dad, I’m not ready for Riley to have a love life!”
“That’s pretty good that he was willing to talk to you about it, though, don’t you think?”
“Are you kidding?” said my daughter. “That’s all he’s been talking about ever since he got in the car! He says she’s very cute and that he really likes having a girlfriend. He even said she is `sweet as a strawberry’. So what am I supposed to do? Isn’t this stuff supposed to happen a few years down the road when puberty hits?”
“Actually,” I said, “if I remember right, one of your teachers reported that you had kissed a boy in class when you were about Riley’s age, so I don’t think the world is going to come to an end. Maybe it’s just in the Fisher genes?”
After I had finished talking with my daughter, I suddenly found myself thinking back to my earliest ventures into romance and recalling that most of them took place at garage dances. When I was about 13 – maybe it was even 12 – my twin sister suggested to my parents that we have a garage dance. And since my mother was convinced that I was completely lacking in all the social graces, she decided that in addition to it being fun for my sister, a garage dance would be a good way for me to start correcting the problem. Anyway, the idea caught on and before long all of our friends for blocks around were hosting Saturday night dances in their colorfully decorated garages. They were very simple affairs, with parents for chaperones, cake to eat and punch to drink, and Ricky Nelson and Elvis Presley records for dancing. I pretty much had to be dragged kicking and screaming to them but usually I had a really good time once I got there, with one very big exception.
Usually the garage dances were attended by all the same local kids that I had grown up with and the girls were more like sisters than potential girlfriends. But one Saturday night, at a garage dance just down the block from my house, a new girl suddenly showed up. Her family had apparently just moved in next door to my best friend who was hosting the garage dance and, trying to be good neighbors, his mother had invited her to attend. Well, I took one look at her and started feeling light-headed and strange all over. I had simply never seen such an exotic-looking girl before, although that word wasn’t even in my vocabulary yet. She had jet black hair, huge brown eyes, and I simply couldn’t take my eyes off her. Then she saw me looking at her, and much to my amazement, smiled at me. Where I got the courage to ask her to dance I will never know, but there we suddenly were, arm-in-arm, doing the West Sac two-step to a very slow song that I hoped would never, ever end. And before it did, just like Riley, I got kissed! It must have been the lipstick she was wearing, or the gum she was chewing, but she tasted even better than she looked! And then, just when I thought I had died and gone to heaven, she started screaming!
To make a very long story short, while I was in what can only be described as an other-worldly trance, my right hand had somehow got caught in her bra strap, and struggle as I might to get it free, the more I tried to yank it out, the more entangled it became. Then, with my friends looking at me like I was a younger version of Jack the Ripper, one of the girls with much more bra-experience than I had mercifully came to my rescue and finally freed my hand, but not without glaring at me hatefully first. Worst of all, my best friend strolled over and whispered into my ear, “If I was you, Daryl, I would get out of here real fast, because she has a huge big brother who I think is going to kill you when he hears about this!”
So, Riley, if you should read this a few years down the road when puberty hits you with full force, just remember that although it’s perfectly okay to kiss girls, just make sure that they don’t have really mean-looking big brothers who simply won’t believe that you can get your hand caught in their sister’s bra strap entirely by accident.