In Everyone's Life, There's A....

I've been keeping a journal since I was 13.

My first journal was a pale blue wirebound cardboard datebook from a drugstore, 5 x 7. How I came to have this little notebook I don't remember. Perhaps my mother brought it home and didn't use it, and I found it in a drawer somewhere. Perhaps I bought it myself. Those details have escaped me, and so have all the journals that I meticulously kept all through high school and college.  Hundreds of pages worth, gone, including the journal entry I wrote on the morning of the day I graduated from Chula Vista High School. June 15, 1973. I've thought about having a hypnotist put me "under" and see if under hypnosis I might be able to reconstruct what I wrote that long-ago morning before I donned that blue cap and gown and went off to fetch my diploma.

But you see, on the eve of my 22nd birthday, in 1977, a girl named Melody broke my heart. Overreacting, as poets so often do, (yes, I was a teenage poet) I took all of the journals I had kept during the previous seven years, tossed them into a metal drum and put a match to them.  Written records of high school and college days, gone.

Of some of those destroyed notebooks I say, "Whew. That's a relief. No one will ever see that." Of others, well...

It was in the early spring of 1969 that I began keeping my first diary. My family was living in Spokane, Washington that year. I was in the eighth grade. Entries were short, terse and didn't say much. "High 59. No mail. My sisters watching Dark Shadows after school. Drab day."

Well, I was 13. You couldn't expect my diaries to run in the same crowd as those of Samuel Pepys or Anais Nin.

On the other hand, some noteworthy things did work their way into that first-ever notebook of mine.

My first kiss, for instance. Although the notebook is long gone, this page I remember clearly.

I'm talking about my first real kiss, the first time I ever kissed a girl on the lips, not just the cheek. That's a rite-of-passage in anyone's life. Or it used to be, anyway.

First kiss. Yes, I do remember mine.

Her name was Nancy. Nancy Layton. She was a school friend of my late younger sister Lynn's.

Nancy, the poor girl, had the misfortune to be extremely pretty. She was a pert little blonde, her hair worn Beatles-style, with bangs in front, and on the sides hanging just down over her ears; slightly oriental (or feline, if you prefer, a trait she shared with my second wife) green eyes; slightly turned-up nose. Nancy was also precocious in her development, by which I mean of course that at age 13 she had gotten a jump on puberty and already had well-developed breasts. Big ones. I call this "misfortune" because naturally, being so well and so precociously endowed, she had the boys after her all the time, and also (I knew this because I was a boy) talking about her when she wasn't there.

By the time Nancy started the seventh grade at Jonas Salk Junior High School in Spokane that fall, she already had "a reputation." Boys were on Nancy's tail constantly, you know, like those packs of dogs you see sniffing around the local girl-dog when she's in season. Nancy didn't have to ask for this attention, nor did she have to exude any special aroma. It was just there, owing to what nature had been either generous or mischievous enough to give her.

I shared my first kiss with Nancy. Lucky me. The late Johnny Carson, when he was a young GI during WWII,  once got to dance with Betty Grable at a USO event. I know how he felt. I got to kiss Nancy Layton. I know exactly how Johnny must have felt.

My family moved back to California about a year later, and I only saw Nancy one more time after that. From a distance: I returned to Spokane for a summer vacation visit with my old school chum Tom Caulton in the summer of 1971. He and I had ridden downtown on our bicycles, and on our way home, as we were cycling up the long hill of Monroe Street back to the north side of town, I glimpsed Nancy, who would have been maybe 15 by then, walking up Monroe Street with some guy, her head on his shoulder.

I didn't stop and say hello; in fact I didn't stop at all. I just rode on by and kept going.

I have every confidence that Nancy was probably pregnant by age 18 if not sooner. By the time she hit 40 she was probably a grandmother. Sex does that.

But on the afternoon of June 28, 1969, Nancy was barely 13 and despite appearances, probably still a virgin; eighth-grade boys, or even ninth, were more talk than conquest in those days.

She came to our house on Lynn's invitation. They were sixth-grade classmates at Loma Verde Elementary School, which, when Carla and I returned to the old neighborhood in 2004 after scattering Lynn's ashes in the Spokane River, we found to have vanished. Only a park remained where the school had once stood.

Our home at 6204 North Alberta Street in Spokane had a big backyard in 1969, with a pool. It was a small pool, maybe ten feet square and four feet deep, with a deck and a fence surrounding it. It took ten hours to fill the pool with a garden hose. It had no heating or filter; when the pool was filled late in the spring with water from the garden hose, it would be far too cold to swim in; we would have to wait a couple of days, letting the sun shine on the water all day until it became merely cold, not icy.

It was too small a pool for real swimming of course, but on a 92-degree July day, the splashing-around we were able to do in it was both refreshing and fun.

Nancy came over to our house that day, on Lynn's invitation, to go in the pool.  Nancy wore a one-piece swimsuit, dark blue, and memory might not be serving me correctly, but I somehow recall that her swimsuit also had a little skirt-ruffle around the waist; swimsuits sometimes did in those days. Anyway, Nancy, Lynn and I all went out to the pool.

I would turn 14 that fall. I was a more-or-less normal boy for that age, as horny as all of my friends were, and every bit as susceptible as they to Nancy's charms, but shy, fighting acne and probably more than a little self-conscious owing to, among other things, that idiotic first name my mother had given me which, until I quit using it halfway through my sophomore year of high school, always made me feel somewhat set apart from the other kids. A freak of sorts. And I was morbidly sensitive. In short, I was as shy and unsure of myself at age 13, confronting Nancy Layton, as I would be 17 years later with another girl, Holly Brayton, who resembled Nancy in some other ways besides the fact that their last names rhymed.

Somehow, that afternoon, probably in a half-joking way aimed at protecting my hurt pride should I be rebuffed, (again, much the same way I would approach Holly in 1986) I managed to make Nancy understand that I would like to kiss her. Nancy was no stranger to that situation. She let me kiss her. A real kiss, on the lips, deep enough, though I'm sure not "French." It was my first real kiss with a girl. And of course it was intoxicating, magical. Kissing is, by its nature. That's why it's been so popular for about 10,000 years. Goethe, no monk himself, held kissing in higher regard than the sex act itself, owing to its spiritual overtones as opposed to the more "animalistic" character of the other. I don't know as I would go that far, but there is a good reason why the poets, Goethe included, have for all these centuries rhapsodized about the magic of a kiss.

13 year-old Nancy with her 18 year-old body knew all about kissing, and was more than willing to share her erudition with a shy boy who just happened to be almost a year older than she.

As boys will, I kept count of the number of kisses Nancy and I shared that afternoon in and around the pool. And being already a journal-keeper at going-on-14, I duly recorded the experience in my little blue notebook: "Nancy Layton came over to swim, and I kissed her 28 times in the afternoon."

Later, when I saw the film Summer of '42, there was a moment in the movie that rang familiar bells. In a movie-within-a-movie moment, the two boys in the film, Hermie and Oscy, accompany two girls, Miriam and Aggie, into a theater to see Now, Voyager starring Bette Davis and Paul Henreid. The boys are of course looking to put the moves on the girls. In the darkened theater Hermie begins caressing and squeezing what he thinks is his date's breast, only his hand has taken a wrong turn in the groping and he's actually squeezing her arm. Oscy looks over and notices his friend's mistake in the semi-darkness of the theater, and tries to silently correct his pal, but Hermie doesn't get the message, shoots him a dirty look and goes on squeezing.

After the movie, as the boys are on their way home, Hermie boasts of having squeezed and caressed Aggie's breast "for fourteen minutes." A "record," he says. Oscy needles him: "Are you sure it wasn't an arm?"

They haggle over this detail. Oscy insists it was an arm Hermie was squeezing, not a breast.  "Make sure you know what the hell it is you're squeezing, Hermie," he finally shouts, "especially if you're puttin' a CLOCK on it and goin' for RECORDS!"

They wind up laughing all the way home. I guess teenage boys didn't change much between 1942 and 1969. And probably haven't changed much since, come to think of it, although technology has certainly enabled their concupiscence to an extent far beyond what was available to us boys of the 1960s and '70s, who were restricted to sneaking a peek at Playboy when we sought initiation into The Mysteries. Nowadays teenage boys are so marinated with cyber-porn and late-night video that first kisses probably don't carry quite the throw-weight in a boy's memory that they once did. And first kisses are, or were, so very important,  At least mine was.

Of course there was a fallout: I was more like Hermie in the film than I was like Oscy. Hermie was the romantic dreamer, Oscy the lusty boy who just wanted to "get laid." I couldn't kiss a girl like Nancy, or many years later, like Holly, and then simply file the experience away and move on to the next thrill. I had a bad crush on Nancy for the first few months of my ninth-grade year at Salk, just as, years later, I could never get Holly completely off my mind, right through X number of relationships and even two marriages. What might have happened if Holly had bestowed my first kiss upon me, rather than Nancy?

But oh, that couldn't have happened. We were kids, and kid-dom is a world unto itself. A couple of years' difference in age, no big deal when you and your date are both in your forties, are a very big deal when the years and the perspective are still short: when I was 13, Holly was only seven. No, it couldn't have happened, even if I had lived in Athens, Greece, where Holly lived at that age. She was in the second grade when I was in the eighth. An ocean of time, then.

Still, if I had to pick my two all-time most memorable, and most significant, moments with girls, they would be June 28, 1969, the day Nancy granted me my first real kiss, and February 13, 1986, the night sweet Holly opened her arms to my sorry, beaten-up ass.

God bless them both. Each was in her own way an angel, and neither knew it.