MY FIRST KISS

 Islanders tend to wait for the mail with more patience than you might think them capable of. 

A little crowd, mostly retired folk, gathers at the Vinalhaven Post Office most mornings about the time the ferry arrives, and a cyclical reconnaissance begins as one after another peers through the little glass windows of individual mailboxes, at the employees on the other side of the wall and can judge from the sorting and distributing activity how near finished they are.  

This is a familiar group, intimately acquainted with one another and only a little less so with those of us who simply pop in and out to get our mail.  One day my arrival to pick up my mail coincided with that of a woman about my own age.  I held the door open for her and a memory coughed and sputtered. 

She bent to open her post office box.

“You know,” I announced to the regulars, pointing to her as she straightened up. “That is the first girl I ever kissed.”

She blushed and rushed to assure everyone within earshot that she remembered nothing of the kind but does recall that, as children, when a bunch of us were skating, I grabbed her by the arm and tried to guide her into the shadows.

“Why’d I do that?”

“For goodness sake, think about it.  All I know is that I’d just gotten a polio shot and my arm was killing me.”

I didn’t remember that incident, but I do remember that kiss.

We sat behind the old gym on the steeply sloping ledge with our backs against the building.  I was around ten years old, she a little younger.  She had on shorts and her legs, sticking out of them, were like those of a heron.  We each embraced our own drawn up knees.

Our arms afforded some modesty as, with our faces buried in them, we talked about marriage and then about kissing, which we knew from having watched our parents, had a lot to do with it. 

We would kiss, we agreed, but only after we’d established a level of commitment, so we agreed to marry when we grew up, and we agreed we’d live in the little abandoned house that stood right next to where we sat, and we agreed to have three children.

That settled, we let go of our knees and we put our arms on each other’s shoulders and, with our eyes wide open, we kissed.

Her fingers were cold where one or two of them touched my neck.  So were her lips.  My lips were not cold.  Nearly cross-eyed, I returned her stare and imagined her thinking, “My, his lips are warm,” and I imagined her imagining, “I’ll bet he’s thinking, ‘My, her lips are cold,’” and she’d have been right.  

That was solemn occasion, and the solemnity was palpable as, our commitment to one another cemented, we walked up the drive to High street holding hands and full of the greatness of the moment.  We turned left and walked a few hundred feet to where she would exit to her house on the hill.

Before we parted, we engaged in an awkward embrace and I made an effort to impart another kiss, but she turned her head as, just then, my playful Uncle Vic drove by honking his horn to applaud my style.  I kissed her hair and a part of an ear as it all passed through my lips 

My heart was all she could carry as she turned home.

I continued down the hill, across the bridge to my house.  People watched and knew they were seeing a different person than the boy who’d gone up the hill a little earlier.  I had no feet, for example.  I glided noiselessly by.  And, of course, I had no heart for, as everyone knows, a young boy moving with no feet has had his heart stolen. 

When I got home, I told my parents I had found my mate and about where we planned to live and about the three kids we planned on and, finally, watching them closely, I told them about the kiss.  They listened carefully and seriously, and I knew I was on solid ground.

I’ll never forget that afternoon and I’ll never forget that kiss, although, it might not have been her; it might have been her sister.