There is a first time for everything ... eventually
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- July 8, 2023
- 885
If I told you the first girl I ever kissed was the daughter of a preacher man, you’d just shake your head and assume that, as an unreliable narrative writer, I was simply making up another story.
And I couldn’t blame you.
I mean not every single word I’ve had published over these many years is the absolute gospel truth, since I’ve used some tools of the trade to embellish and occasionally exaggerate my life story, not with the intent to deceive, but to make it a bit more interesting.
As William Hurt says after a particularly cutting remark in “The Big Chill,” one that upsets his college friends, “I’m just trying to keep the conversation lively,” and I understand that tendency.
But I know my limits. When you’ve done something like this for so long, you see around corners and understand a reader’s trust isn’t to be trifled with; without that, after all, you’re just another charlatan behind the curtain, the one who says, with regret, “No, I’m a very good man … I’m just a terrible wizard.”
With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get back to summer 1970 when, as a 15-year-old kid with hardly any experience in the fickle ways of romance, I understood I was always going to be lagging a bit in the learning curve in the game of love.
You probably remember I danced with a pretty girl when my eighth-grade class got together for a send-off before the start of junior high and, prior to that, the way another pretty girl put her mittened hand in my gloved one as we ice skated the winter before.
Those were milestone moments, for sure, but hand-holding and slow-dancing weren’t exactly in the same league as lip-locking.
For that next chapter to be written, I’d need a perfect stranger.
That was the time of “Ride, Captain Ride” and “War,” of “Band of Gold” and “Mama Told Me Not to Come,” of “Ball of Confusion” and “25 or 6 to 4,” all part of arguably the best summer of music that the Golden Age of AM radio had to offer. It was also, coincidentally, the time when Dad trusted me to spend a few hours every day painting the long, tall wooden fence in the back yard.
That was quite a step up in my growing-up process in that it represented a quantum leap in the trust factor between fathers and their first-born sons. It was one thing to earn a few dollars pushing a mower around the lawn once a week. It was an entirely different matter to be charged with a home owner’s major renovation project, one whose results would be not only visible but lasting.
As with anything worth doing, I developed a reliable routine, one that had me outside long before the hottest hours of the day, which meant I had to forego lots of sleep, but I was determined to do well.
The brushes and rollers already cleaned overnight, I set up drop cloths so the reddish-brown paint wouldn’t stain the flowers and shrubs planted along the fence row. Then I made sure that when I needed the ladder, it was placed in a way that ensured the simplest and most effective way of proceeding, a sort of guideline.
As for me, I just wore a Yankee cap, T-shirt and shorts, with an old pair of Chuck Taylor sneakers that had seen better days. With my transistor radio and a cooler of Mountain Dew bottles, I was all set.
That was the summer of “Ohio” and “Silver Bird,” of “In the Summertime” and “Patches,” of “Lay Down” and “Indiana Wants Me,” and into that world walked the daughter of a preacher man.
I had come into the kitchen to make a bologna sandwich, and there she was, sitting at the kitchen table, as if she’d been waiting for me.
We said our hellos, and I asked, “What are you doing here?” since it wasn’t all that common for strangers to simply appear in our house, but about then my sister came downstairs and explained she was in town from Goshen visiting family of some sort, though I’m a little hazy on the details, even all these years down the road.
What you need to know is one thing led to another and there came a Saturday afternoon when she joined me upstairs to listen to the Woodstock album, that landmark three-record set I’d just bought at the mall, using some of my fence-painting earnings.
The record player — nothing fancy, just a simple machine with settings for 45s and 33 and a-thirds — was in the bedroom I shared with my brother, two beds, two dressers and his desk.
In other words, not a lot of seating for entertaining, if that’s what it was, but I was new to that kind of interaction, so after I put the needle down on the first track of Side One, we sat on my brother’s bed, something I still can’t explain, but that’s part of the story.
For those of you who remember that record, you don’t need me to remind you the song that opens the album is John Sebastian’s “I Had a Dream,” and it’s a wonderful, wistful tune, full of hope and optimism, possibilities and gentle innocence, and before it was over, the daughter of a preacher man had introduced me to kissing.
Everyone has similar stories, and they all matter. They are part of the rich tapestries of our lives, the things you don’t ever forget, and when we cast our memories back, they simply make you smile.
I never saw her again, and that’s part of it all too, I suppose, life being what it so often is, a seemingly random set of circumstances that, viewed from a distance, come together as perfectly as a well-painted fence in the back yard, something that can last a long time.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He invites you to join the fun on his Facebook page, where there’s a first time for everything.