The Kiss

My neighbor and I were walking to middle school. She’d discovered boys. Do you know what a French kiss is? She asked. No. I didn’t.

She explained the mechanics of it.

Gross. You’re doing that? I said. She was. Wow.

I was dumbstruck by the details of a French kiss.

While she experimented with kissing, I was still mashing my cushy foam buttercup Winnie the Pooh bear. I most certainly was not going to do that French thing.

I thought of the boys I knew. I couldn’t kiss any of them. I’d known most of them since 1st grade, some even kindergarten.

How did she know about French kissing anyway? I wondered. Where did she learn about it? Anyway, thus far no kissing candidates had lined up for my sweet pink smackers. Holding clammy sweaty hands with a boy at the roller-skating rink was about the most bodily fluid exchange I could handle, no lips involved.

Then my big sister decided to get married at 18. She definitely must have been kissing this guy that French way. But whatever. What was great though, was that her future husband happened to have two hot dark-haired teenage boys.

You see where this is going?

My first kiss is around the corner…

One weekend, my sister invited me to watch one of the boy’s high school wrestling matches. His nickname was Mouse, but he was more python like. Swift at a take down, he struck his opponent with lightning speed. His muscles popped under his form fitting spandex singlet uniform as he rendered his opponent helpless.

That did it. I developed an instant massive crush on him.

Forget that he’d soon be my step-nephew, and I’d be his step-aunt, though I was younger by 2 years.

I set Winnie the Pooh aside.

Shortly after the wrestling match, the python wrestler and his best friend invited me to hang out with them. They took me to a party and handed me a beer. I’d never had beer.

I performed my best I’ve done this before act even though my experience with alcohol was limited to tiny shot glasses of Manischewitz Concord Grape Wine my older brother Andrew and I snuck from my parent’s liquor cabinet on New Year’s Eve.

Not sure of how beer tasted, I tested it with a small sip. I couldn’t drink it, but I wanted to fit in even more so I pretended to drink it. When no one was looking, I poured the beer into a house plant.

I felt really bad knowing I was killing someone’s plant.

As more beer was consumed, I noticed other teens start to pair up.

And then it happened.

My soon to be step-nephew struck. Like the python he was, he pulled me to him and kissed me in that French way. He tasted like beer, but I liked it this way.

So this was French kissing.

His hands wandered to other regions, but I rerouted them. One thing at a time here, I thought, I’m trying to get the hang of this French kiss thing.

For the rest of my life I compared all other kisses to his. I think he was a natural talent. Because if you have kissed a variety of people you’ll know that everyone has their own technique and idea of what a kiss entails, especially a French kiss. They’re all different. Which can be surprising.

I wonder if that’s how it goes?

Do our first experiences influence us in a way that sets a line that we hover close to, for the rest of our lives?

I documented my first kiss in my diary. It was that good. And then I came up with the clever idea to document every kiss I received thereafter right through high school. I wrote the kisser’s name, and rated their kiss with stars.

If only I had an entrepreneurial mind like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg. This could have been the seed for the making of a Kiss App. But that didn’t happen.

So, if you remember kissing me anytime up through high school, your name is in my diary with my personal one to five-star rating. Don’t sweat it though, if you know you are in there and you hadn’t yet perfected your kissing technique as a young teen, nobody but you and I will ever know. I’d never post a public bad review.

We all want to be good kissers don’t we?

Even now, I check my technique when I kiss. I ask myself if I am utilizing all of what I have to offer? Maybe I explore here and there and test new methods. How’s that? Or that? Or this? No go - , maybe here instead…?

Life. It’s yours. Go all in.

Do you remember your first kiss?