THE KISSERS 

Dear Readers – I think we know each other well enough now to talk about my past.  You will know something I haven’t talked to Philip about very much!

This is a tricky topic.  One of my toughest messages to Phil, and the hardest blog posts, was admitting how many men I’ve been with.  I never know whether a guy I’m involved with wants to know about my past romances or not.  I hesitate to say much before I know him relatively well.  And I always ask him first.  I adore knowing about his past.  There are so many clues to how he got the way he is and why he feels the way he does, and various things I can do with him that he’s never experienced!

I discovered boys at an early age.  When I was a little girl, we had neighbors with four boys who were my pals but always trying to show me their junk and touch me in creepy ways .  I got into wrestling matches with them but managed to keep myself safe.

The summer of 1969 when I was nine years old, my folks sent me to church camp for a week out in the woods.  There were wonderful kids there from all over!  We made crafts, sang, prayed, swam, danced and told stories around a camp fire.  There was a sweet, fey dark-haired boy with big glasses from the big city who sat next to me all the time and told me funny stories.  By the end of the week, I declared him my boyfriend!  We lived about 12 miles apart, but wrote letters,  talked on the phone and saw each other now and then when I could get my dad to pick him up so we could walk around the mail together.  He and his best friend went to my junior high dance with my best friend.  We spent four summer camps together.  At the end of the week the summer I was twelve, I kissed him good-bye.  He told me he didn’t like it and not to do that again!  But we stayed friends.  So you see – I started the long-distance romance thing early!

Philip – I started high school the week I turned fourteen in 1973.  Our church had a fair every September, and Philip, a gorgeous boy from the choir, helped me string banners.  He held the ladder while I clambered up to nail them here and there.  He was a junior – an athlete with big shoulders, long brown hair and brown eyes.  We hung out after choir practice.  I invited him to a church camp retreat weekend.  We lay in the grass during the campfire while they told stories and sang songs.  And he kissed me.  My first grown-up kiss!  We held hands and sat together at lunch in school.  We went to a dance and did a lot more kissing.  Then he said he didn’t love me.  He was in love with someone else.  He broke up with me.   I was devastated.  But I buried all that, and we stayed friends for two years until he left for the military.  I pined for him for years and then forgot him almost completely.  Little did I know I would hear from him again many years later!