Cranky Is The New Perky

We traffic in nostalgia around here.  If you have come for shiny quips about modern parenthood, you have come to the wrong blog.  Not that there is anything wrong with stories of parenting.  It’s just that I spend so much time being consumed by and obsessed with my kids that I need a place where it is all about me.

My mind, which has never been good with dates, facts and reality, can’t quite grasp that Memorial Day weekend is almost here.  This means several days with the kids at the beach.  I will be hiding under the beach umbrella religiously applying SPF60 or higher while languidly watching the children and hoping they don’t caught in a rip tide or beat each other bloody with sand shovels.

The last time I tanned I was 14 and I got it up to a burnished copper hue.  We were in Cape May, my friends and their parents who were friends with my parents.  My parents came briefly and left quickly.  They rented restored Victorian houses on quiet streets – it was like Capitol Hill with an ocean front.  All the girls shared a room, clothes, makeup, sometimes secrets.

We gang of girls were obsessed with boys and the holy grail of a beach romance.  Well, they were obsessed, I was terrified of any boy who wasn’t a childhood friend and therefore automatically a eunuch.

The most successful at this boy thing was Cat.  She was (still is) beautiful with peaches and cream skin and ever-changing blue green eyes.  She was a dead ringer for Lady Di and played it up by getting her signature haircut.  She hit puberty way before me and at 13 had actual breasts which caused me to gaze wistfully at my so flat it is almost concave chest.  Cat could also actually talk to boys with confidence and skill while I always blushed, stammered, and drooled on myself.

We spent the cooling summer evenings walking back and forth on the boardwalk to the arcades that anchored each end.  We looked at boys also travelling in packs, they looked at us, and no contact was made.  Cat was the first to break through – she met a boy named Rob with feathered hair like Shaun Cassidy.  From him we learned many things: that tourists were despised and called Shoobees and that the dunes next to the arcade were the make out point.  Soon Cat and Rob were going out and spent many nights in the dunes while we remaining girls wandered around sadly, spending hours racking up skeeball tickets to be redeemed for glass animals or statues of ponies or kittens.

And then one night I met a boy named Emmett at the skeeball machines.  He was polite and friendly and I was able to talk to him without brushing bright red or making random noises meant to be conversation.  He asked if he could take me out the next night.

He showed up the next day and the adults were fascinated by his good manners in coming in to pick me up and making polite remarks.  They ragged on Cat as Rob used to come by on his bike and shout up or throw pebbles very inaccurately at her window.  He was from the south and soft-spoken and had good manners. 

I don’t remember much of the evening – we ate somewhere, had ice cream, and then slowly progressed toward the make out dunes. 

When we got there I stopped him.  I had something very important to ask him before we went any further.  He was from Georgia and my impression from growing up in DC Public Schools from the stories I heard was that all white southerners were card carrying Klan Members.  I had seen the life and times of Miss Jean Brodie twice.  Looking deep into his eyes (thankfully he was taller than me) I asked him gently if he was a racist.  No, he said, not put off by my question, he was on the basketball team and all his teammates were black and he couldn’t get by in the world if he disliked black people.

We got that out of the way and got done to kissing.  I had been kissed once in a closet during an afterschool game of spin the bottle and I regret to say my instinctive reaction was to knee that guy in the groin.  But this was real kissing, nice kissing, now I knew what they talked about in books.

I only saw him a few more nights and then we had to leave.  I traded in my winnings for a china dog of uncertain parentage and headed back to DC. 

But every year when summer starts I think of my one summer romance and how I learned to kiss.

            

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