All these years later, it’s the song that still matters
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- August 29, 2018
- 1508
We all remember our first kiss. It’s one of those non-negotiable memories, in the same league as your first heartbreak. In some cases I suppose they could be linked, locked together for eternity. That wasn’t the case when it finally happened for me.
And I use the word “finally” carefully, knowing full well its weight.
For a lot of you, maybe most of you, that first kiss was a distant landmark, passed well before you crossed your 15th birthday. And I get that. I was late to the party.
But I was a cautious kid, the kind who worried not only about setting a good example for his younger siblings, but also terrified God was just waiting to hurl a thunderbolt at me should I step the slightest bit out of line.
Religion was a big deal when I was growing up. It was Roman Catholicism all day, every day, and that kind of relentless indoctrination has a tendency to make a guy pretty nervous, especially when it came to girls.
The nuns had a term for them. They were called the “near occasion of sin.”
Think about that for just a second. It’s kind of terrifying, denying natural attraction to the fairer sex, expecting a stain on your soul.
I can smile about it now, decades down life’s long highway, but there was a time when it was no laughing matter when you were balancing academics, religion and ambition as the skirts got shorter and the sweaters got tighter.
Dad probably could have given me one of those “facts of life” lectures, the kind sitcom fathers like Ward Cleaver delivered on TV, but that wasn’t his style. He was a college professor. He expected you to learn some things on your own.
That was probably smart because I wouldn’t have understood much of what he was warning me about. Besides, I wasn’t stupid. I knew what was out there and that if I wasn’t an idiot, things would happen in their own sweet time.
For me it was the summer of 1970. The radio was playing “Ride, Captain, Ride” and “War” and “Close to You” and “Make It with You” and “Tighter, Tighter.”
I heard them all the time on my transistor radio as I painted the backyard fence, a daunting project Dad entrusted to me, one that lasted from Memorial Day until almost Independence Day.
My days were predictably, comfortably uniform. Clean the brushes, mix the paint, lay down the drop cloths, clear away any foliage, make sure you had your lucky hat on and most importantly place the radio in an optimum location.
And then, well, I did the job my father expected me to do. It was a fine, rewarding summer, one I remember fondly. And then something happened.
After another day of painting a section of 6-foot-tall fence, doing my cleanup and storing the supplies in the garage, my sister showed up in the kitchen with a friend in tow.
I never really understood how the two of them got together. I suppose it doesn’t really matter. All I can tell you is she was pretty, she had a nice smile and for reasons I can’t fully explain, she seemed to like me.
She had long brown hair, she was tall and slim, she liked music, and she and I found ourselves alone a lot over the next few days and nights. As it turned out, she was in town with her father, who was — wait for it — a Protestant preacher.
Yeah, I know. Ridiculous. What were the odds, right?
But there we were in the bedroom I shared with my younger brother, and I’d put on the first side of the Woodstock album, and, well, it finally happened: my first kiss.
I remember it so well. John Sebastian was singing “I Had a Dream,” and we were in each other’s arms, and her eyes were closed and mine were wide open, memorizing every detail. All these years later, it’s the song that still matters.
Don’t misunderstand me. She was a girl who ushered me into a new realm of reality, and I will always remember her the same way I do the girl I walked home in the third grade, the same way I do the girl I gave my ID bracelet to when she was in the seventh grade and the same way I remember the girl who accepted my clumsy invitation to dance as Paul Mauriat’s “Love is Blue” played during our Catholic school’s eighth-grade farewell party. They all live in my memory.
We all have that kind of inventory, the moments that seemed unreachable, unfathomable and then blessedly happened.
Who knows if that daughter of a preacher man has ever given me a second thought since that hot August afternoon when she carried me into a new dimension, something intimate and awesome.
It doesn’t even matter. Wherever she is and whatever she’s up to, I hope life has been a wonderful ride, one that has made her as happy as possible.
As for me, well, I’m a firm believer in John Sebastian and a line he penned for the Lovin’ Spoonful, the one about how the magic’s in the music and the music’s in me.
Feel free to sing along.
Mike Dewey can be emailed at CarolinamikedD@aol.com or snail-mailed at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He invites you to join the fun on his Facebook page, where life and love, family and friends, music and memories are always available.