We lived in the country in a two bedroom house on blocks without an indoor bathroom. My mother's grandparents had a small farm across the highway, and her parents house was on a piece of property next to that. My mother and father both worked in Dayton, so I spent my days with my grandmother. We watched Captain Kangaroo in the mornings and then cut pictures and made paste from flour and water, and I would make collages and color. Then we would work in the garden and we would sing "Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel" while we worked. Then we ate lunch and I had to take a nap while she watched soap operas. And when I got up, I would play.
But when I got to be a certain age, my parents decided that I needed to be around other children, and they enrolled me in a day school. My grandmother cried furiously over that.
Day school was interesting enough, though it was pretty cold and impersonal. I don't remember getting to know many kids. But it was there that I fell in love for the first time. I can't remember her name, but it seems that I can still see her face. She was a little beauty. There were colorful stick ponies, and us boys would play cowboy while the girls gathered in a playhouse near the fence line. Eventually, we began to ride our horses out to see the girls, and soon, they were giving kisses. My first came from her, and I never quit thinking about it. We began to take naps beside one another at nap time. The room was filled with cots, sheets hung between them to keep us quiet, but she would pull the sheet up and whisper and giggle. She was a little devil, I guess, because I could see the joy this gave her, though it scared me to death. I knew we would get caught and we would get in trouble, and we did. And the punishment for this was that we could not sleep beside one another any more.
It wasn't long before the great flood came that ruined out house and caused my father to decide to move us to Florida. And again, my grandmother wailed and wailed to lose her little boy.
Other than getting a terrible pain in my stomach that landed me in the hospital overnight, I don't remember much about the day school except that little girl. I dreamed about her after we moved for many years. We lived together and had our own home like that little play house only bigger. Eventually, I got old enough to wonder why I was still having those dreams, and then they stopped. I had come of the age when I was ready for my second kiss. It would not be the same, though, not so devilishly innocent as that first. Nothing ever would be.
I had a similar "first love/first kiss" but it was a tomboyish girl in the neighborhood.
ReplyDeleteWe made a "fort" in a vacant lot with a linoleum floor.It was really a bunch of carboard boxes. The door was a blanket. That's where we met - & got caught.
She had more confidence than I ever did.
Christ. Look at those two. My lover's first girlfriend (age 6 or 7) was a red-head -- and he's partial to them to this day-- darn him and them. I could see why though if she looked anything like that. Pink sparkle hat and all. and Him. oy. the stuff poems are made of. Hurts me to look at that photo (which I like very much and keep looking at in order to be wounded --cause pangs like that are what make me feel the most alive). Course the story helps.
ReplyDeleteMy father's mother lived upstairs from us. She was from Austria. Here's a poem I wrote about her (sick of me yet):
Gumamma's Satchel
was loaf-shaped, brown leather
with wornsmooth latches but it held none of her apple strudel.
The apple strudel she made with sour buttermilk
just a drop
the apple strudel we dusted with confectionary sugar
snowed down from her old metal shaker dented on top
the apple strudel whose dough was so thin when she stretched it across the table
we held our breath so it wouldn't break.
The apple strudel that when warm from the oven riding its Blue Willow carriage Uncle Bruno with Otto his beagle would arrive all the way from Passaic for a huge heaping plate.
No.
The satchel held different plums;
small jars of buttons and dominoes not made from plastic, decks of cards decorated
with magic characters, the Scotty dog magnets. Post cards and street maps
of faraway places and stamps peeled from ancient letters; black & white pictures of fancy children on the backs of Great Danes.
My brother
always wanted to hold the soft photo of Alexander, Gumamma's baby brother,
who died when the gravestone fell on his head.
To Grandmothers... clink.
Beauty & Truth -- that is what I've named these two.
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