Tuesday, November 03, 2015

Newts, Plus Some Kissing and Telling

A couple of months ago, there were little Chorus frogs everywhere. Now, no doubt because of the recent rain, the walkways are crawling with tiny newts. I think we can thank the absence of bullfrogs in the pond for these as well. Adult newts are extremely toxic and any bullfrog ingesting one wouldn't live to repeat the mistake. The larval stage, on the other hand, don't contain the tetrodotoxin that the adults do, and thus make yummy snacks for everybody. This morning, I rescued several from the pathways, one from our staff room, and one from the boy's bathroom.

Here are three of them, hanging out on a moist patch of concrete in the middle of the night.


This is day 3 of my November writing challenge, and this is the only time I'll ever kiss and tell in these virtual pages.

Your first love and first kiss; if separate, discuss both:

I’m going to use my context clues and assume this question means my first romantic love. I could feign ignorance and talk about my childhood love for dinosaurs and monster movies, but no…

My first love was a girl named Sara. I was kind of a late bloomer, not due to a lack of interest, but because I was shy around the opposite sex and had low self-esteem when it came to my confidence in attracting that kind of attention from girls I liked. So, it wasn’t until I was nearly 20 (or maybe already 20) that I had my first proper girlfriend. I’m not really counting the girlfriend I had in the sixth grade. My sixth grade girlfriend was named Christie Williams, and I still wince when I remember how I asked her out. It went something like: “my friends want me to ask you to be my girlfriend”. That’s right, I was so lacking in confidence that I left myself a backdoor in case she just laughed at me. If I blamed the whole thing on my friends, I could respond to rejection with: “I didn’t really want to go out with you anyway. It was all my friends’ idea”. She said yes though. We sat around together and sometimes held hands. She broke up with me at Redwood Glen, which was the sixth grade science camp back then (it’s actually the same program I work for now, although under a different name and at a different location) because I was a messy eater. I think it was the spaghetti dinner that did me in. Anyway, Sara didn’t come into the picture until nearly a decade after that. I had plenty of female friends in the interim, but I never asked any of them out because I didn’t want to take the risk of introducing a huge awkwardness into our friendship if my advances ended up being rejected. There’s that fear of rejection again. With Sara, she made it pretty clear that she liked me. She was a few years younger than me, and lived 90 miles away. We’d met at Gilman St. (the punk club in Berkeley where I spent the majority of my time on the weekends, and where I still occasionally attend gigs to this day), which was around halfway between our houses. We dated for around a year and a half, with me heading up to Napa on the weekends and often staying there until late Sunday evening. This is when I started drinking coffee. It’s scary when you start to fall asleep while driving. She broke up with me shortly after she got her own car. I think she’d started seeing a previous boyfriend again, or maybe she just wasn’t excited at the prospect of driving all the way down to see me. In my relative naivety, I thought our relationship would last forever, and my agony at having her end it precipitated my move away from home. I suppose that was the lemonade that came from that particular lemon. It was good while it lasted, I suppose. We became friends on Facebook a few years ago, and had an interaction or two there, but she has since dropped off of that particular social media platform (maybe for one or more of the reasons outlined in my answers to the first question in the writing challenge).

I had my first kiss in the 5th or 6th grade, so I must have been 10 or 11 years old. There was a line of redwood trees along the fence at our elementary school, and like many kids, we were drawn to the trees, mostly because if we sat under them or between their thick trunks and the fence that separated the schoolyard from the backyards of nearby houses, we weren’t under the direct supervision of the “yard duty” (in retrospect, it’s funny that we would call a person “yard duty”, as if it were an official title rather than the description of a thankless task – that aside, I actually liked the old lady, Mrs. Larson, who performed yard duty and acted as a crossing guard – she often gave me things, like little wind-up monsters and candy and such). Anyway, one day a bunch of us played a game of Spin the Bottle, and I ended up kissing a girl named Lisa (who, strangely enough, just sent me a Facebook friend request a few days ago). It was very clinical – we pressed our mouths together, inserted our tongues, and moved them around. Our tongues were like two fish, alarmed to run into each other in the dark and frantically slipping past one another. I felt no real spark of excitement, other than the excitement that accompanies doing something forbidden. I was intrigued by the mystery of this weird adult ritual. I also remember going swimming at Lisa’s friend Melissa’s house, where the girls would jump into the pool in such a way that their shirts would ride up. The boys, myself included, were underwater with goggles. Not that there was much to see at that age.

I didn’t kiss anybody else (maybe not even my so-called 6th grade girlfriend, who I have no memory of actually ever kissing), until early in high school, when my friend Cristie drunkenly kissed me at a Michael Schenker show. In the interim, I’d matured enough to really enjoy the experience, and one of my other friends had to pull me away because he was impatient to leave. Due to the fact that Cristie was actually seeing somebody else at the time, neither of us ever followed up on that one kiss. We're still friends though, even after all of this time, and even if these days it's mostly limited to occasional Facebook interactions.

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