December 28, 1954

image by Aral Tasher

December 28, 1954.  Sixteen years old in the country where I spent all my 

vacations, where I was more part of the kids I played with there than the ones in San Francisco, whose estranged distance seemed greater than that between my parents. On that night, on that most remarkable night I have never forgotten for more than sixty years, Sally Johnson kissed me.  Me!

I didn’t kiss her until she kissed me; then, I kissed Sally Johnson’s kiss with the kiss that was all the kisses of my life I had ever yearned and dreamed to kiss. I was acknowledged me - boy, young man, whose reason for being was girls – all of them – in fourteen year-old Sally Johnson’s kiss.

Fourteen-year-old Sally Johnson is seventy-nine years old now, and I wonder if she remembers that night of epiphany.  Probably not.  Sally Johnson, after all, was a girl of kissing experience, and later, the next year, became lover to a nineteen-year-old -  an ‘older man,’ whom I remember as fat.  And ugly.  

Perhaps I am mistaken.  Perhaps Sally Johnson found in that boy she kissed someone she had grown attracted to all those summers he had come across the bay and played and swam and ridden bikes and horses, who had known her older sister, her parents, her friends, and her dog. For sure, it was he she had told her girl friends she wanted to invite to a party, and when they told him, he felt that great, snapping twang! of excitement of knowing! - that this girl, in all her female mystery, liked him.

If we had been adults we would have roiled through the days, but that December was a kissing time into New Years, on the piano bench in her living room, in driveways, laundry rooms! - everywhere!  – a kissing time as rich as roiling – richer, even, for such a kissing time is a promise, a presentation, and a portent.

Since then, I, and Sally Johnson, I am sure, have kissed often, but for me, no kisses of lovers and other strangers, and yes, my One and Only of forty-five years whom I miss dearly, can be the kiss of a girl who likes you. It is magnificent and unmatchable.  Without apology or remorse, there is that one, rounded moment of kissing Sally Johnson whom I had desired beyond my comprehension since I had been twelve.