A crowd of sixth graders swarming, pushing in, collapsing in on themselves like a giddy, hysterical prepubescent supernova about to become a black hole. The playground is blaring, blowing its proverbial speakers with non-sixth-grade school kids—oblivious, yelling, kicking (sometimes missing) big red rubber lopsided balls, making believe, chasing each other, falling off the monkey bars or geodesic domes onto black rubber mats that only sort of cushion the fall, that kind of stuff.
"It's just a kiss. Who cares?" I feebly attempted to reason with myself. But no sixth grade mind, or at least not the one I had, was any match for the swarming chant and building tension encircling and closing in on me and the girl I was supposed to kiss. I was a shy kid. Still mostly am. And while she wasn't particularly shy, this specific set of on-the-hot-seat, in-the-spotlight circumstances1 made even her pretty sheepish. We were both blushing, about to have this moment in front of essentially the entire sixth grade who had hemmed us in amid the clamor of afternoon recess. I could barely think over the yells and chants and squeals. I couldn’t understand why everybody ELSE was making a big deal about it. But I know why it was so nerve-wracking for me: I thought Alison2 was the prettiest girl in the whole sixth grade. And this was gonna be my first kiss3.
Our faces, still clinging to a little baby fat and still unaware of the cruel, spotty number that our teenage years would pull on them (well, mine at least), were huddled together. I think that's as close to any face as I'd ever been, at least as close to any face that I wasn't blood-related to. (My family won't be patenting any hugs or signs of affection any time soon.) I remember us having a conversation in those close facial quarters (which, now, makes me realize there was genuine connection and affection there), laughing at how stupid the whole situation was, feeling her breath on my face, and trying somehow to defuse the hype that was only escalating as what felt like the entirety of the world pushed in on us.
Finally, I screwed up my courage, squinted/closed my eyes, and led with my chin. We kissed for practically no time at all, our lips making the briefest and most box-checking amount of contact. And, frankly, I still hear the deafening squeals of the sixth grade girls and the testoste-roar of the boys and the innocent chatter more than I remember anything connected to my lips. I also remember the weight gone in pure relief, Alison blushing and smiling, and—even as a dumb kid—me punching a dumb mental notch in my belt.
It was a thrill, yes.
And also I was so glad it was over.4
In case you wondered why this first kiss was so pressured and public, a braintrust of sixth grade movers and shakers (surprise: all girls) had decreed that 3-4 “couples” were going to get “married” in the alley by the bathroom entrances during lunch recess. Even then, we all knew it was just a poorly-veiled ruse to instigate some kissing. It may have been my first real experience with peer pressure. And somehow I both fell for it and fell short of it. How did I fall short? Well, to overshare and embarrass myself even further, the lunch recess, post-vows kiss (before the actual first kiss) had been deemed by the committee unsatisfactory. (They weren’t wrong. We had, like, touched faces. Sort of. I don’t know. It was weird. There was a lot of anxiety involved, ok?) So we were required to atone at the next recess and, of course, that involved far more people as word had spread. Good times.
Proof of Alison’s bona fides: her Christmas gift to me was a Beatles cassette, 20 Greatest Hits, that was so impactful that nearly 40 years later I still hear its sequencing, especially with the early-era songs. I can’t hear the end of “She Loves You” without immediately anticipating the harmonica intro of “Love Me Do” in my head. And then “Love Me Do” ending brings up “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” You get the idea. Further proof of Alison’s bona fides: years later, when we were both in high school, she was the only one I could talk into going to see a Peter Tosh documentary at the Tower Theater.
While we were “going together” (or married, as the case may be), one Friday afternoon we went to Trolley Square to see the newest Molly Ringwald movie, For Keeps. We figured it would be a John Hughes-ish/Sixteen Candles-esque teenager movie (it was actually directed by the guy who directed the Karate Kid movies, as well as Rocky and…Rocky V? It had zero good fight scenes, for what it’s worth.) and were just a little uncomfortable when we realized it was a movie about a teenager who gets pregnant (including a PG-13 scene of, uh, conception) and grapples with the decision to keep the baby. Compounding the awkwardness, when she picked us up after the movie, Alison’s mom proceeded to give us (who hadn’t even kissed yet, at that point) a nice little talking to about the importance of being careful when it comes to teen pregnancy. I think I probably said somewhere between zero and four words the whole way home. “Thanks for the ride” would’ve been the four. All else being equal, though, Alison’s mom’s lecture was 100% effective: neither of us got pregnant before our time.
I just want to take a moment and call out how unreasonably proud I am of this email’s subhead: FUMBLING TOWARDS ADEQUACY, a play on Sarah Mclachlan’s album Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, that seems like as good a summary of the events mentioned here as I could find.