MATERNAL WARNING: Consider this your Juvenal caution. This is not the section to be read by close relatives or those who consider me to be just another slightly tedious older woman who may have had a few sad things happen in her life.
Thank you.
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Skin is a wonderful thing. Especially when freely loaned during the course of a few hours. Mothers and sisters don’t need to know the particulars and adult children don’t want to know. And that’s as it should be. For me, in any case.
When did I realize that there was something to this condition of Being Human that carried more baggage, more heartache and more
Nope. I can’t do it.
I can’t write about sex.
I can’t write that there’s a strange tingle in my palms when I’m enjoying vague thoughts of a particular individual. It’s been decades.
But reading the rules, regulations and blogs of a Japanese service that has the government’s Queen Victoria stamp of approval; well, I suspect I may still be alive.
I tingle; therefore, I live.
Let me explain the title and get it out of the way. Remember the elementary school rhyme about walking on the sidewalk? Mothers, or at least mine during the 1980’s, didn’t appreciate being told that her daughter was dallying with people biologically incapable of giving her grandchildren the old-fashioned way.
I won’t say I broke her heart because she didn’t have much left after surviving her incestuous father and suicidal husband. But something cracked after the confession.
She never said the words ‘fag’ or ‘bitch’ until after that. And in a spasm of misguided helpfulness, she blurted out that she was certain she’d heard my sister kiss her female neighbor when they were in the kitchen talking.
Oh. Okay. Whatever.
I have loved men. Faithfully, fearfully and frantically.
I loved my father, the doomed and depressed gentleman who wasn’t allowed to hold his children because his wife had seen what happens when a father touches his children. I always wonder if Daddy could have been even a little healed by being near my sister and I. Or at least with me.
The tag teams were evenly and eternally split: I was Dad’s and my mom and sister were the two Organized Harridans. They lived by charts and spreadsheets and clear divisions of labor. If it’s Saturday then Mom does the laundry, Lisa sweeps the carport, sidewalk and back porch. Then I shake out all the rugs and dump all the house trash into the big metal garbage can outside. Dad mows the yard.
Sunday is Dress-Up Day and we go to the 1100 am service at Trinity Lutheran Church in Bradenton with Pastor Wayne Allran. His wife Barbara was a tiny concrete-reinforced blonde who kept a weather eye on everything, including Wayne. He had an endearing habit of finding wealthy old widows to snuggle up to in the front pews whenever he needed a new piano or choir robes. Pastor Allran was a dead ringer for Wayne Newton except with chiseled Western European features. Same slick and earnest patter. Same innate ability to entertain without going over the line.
After church we would occasionally drop by the William Tally House Coffee Shop.
Nope. This isn’t supposed to be a sweet pelican-scented nostalgic romp through my Wonder Bread Years. (Not Wonder Years. I write exactly what I mean. And I’m talking about nutritionally negligible, tasteless, bland and blameless. Bread pills. That’s all that white bread was good for. You sink your teeth into it and the stuff sticks to your teeth like albino wheat leeches. Nasty.)
This is supposed to be about sex. Or love. Or something resembling either.
First kiss: Rusty. My 8th grade crush. My Daryl Hall (before the ravages of time and substance abuse) look-alike with the white skin and thin patrician features of generations of English Preux chevaliers. I even called him My Knight in Shining Armor.
He was too gentle, too sensitive and too much of a dreamer to survive life. He tried to toughen up by hanging with Bradenton Beach divers and Ruskin marijuana smugglers with the odd Allman Brother thrown in for more local color. He was brought
To be continued
Bluntedhedgehog 