Learning about Boys

Boys! They made me crazy! I hated them, envied them, wanted to be like them and loved them all at the same time sometimes.

The first boy I remember calling "my boyfriend" was QT Grrrrr. He was a cutie! His face was narrow with high cheek bones and always looked tan. With large, wide set brown eyes, full eyebrows, a straight, narrow nose with just a hint of a turn up at the tip over a sensitive set of full, wide lips all peeking out from his straight brown bangs he was just as cute as an irish setter puppy!

We went to the same church. When we were older I would give him a black eye while singing "Deep and Wide". We would go to the same school in the fall. He was really quiet. I don't remember him ever playing with us much as we got older. His family lived about 4 blocks south of us. He rode to our house and gave me a ride on his tricycle handle bars. Then he bought me a candy bar for a nickle! It was the first candy a boy ever gave me!

I think this lasted a week. I don't know but I suspect he wasn't supposed to be so far from home at just five years old and his folks made him stay on his own block. We were friends in the lower grades but our interests went different ways in school and by high school, when he was REALLY cute, I would have had to stand in line for a date with him.

I was moony on and off with the neighbor boy, Jay, most of my younger years. He's another one I don't know the whole story on. Once, we climbed up the tree in the side yard and dragged a big box up behind us for a kind of club house. We balanced it across some branches, crawled into it and "kissed". It was just one kiss, lips banging together would be more accurate.

When we were a couple of years older we would repeat almost the same kiss underwater during swimming lesson at the lake.

We were just barely in our teens when Vee and I went with Day and Jay to get a malted at the A & W downtown. People asked us if we were two sets of twins! That was the closest thing to a date I ever had with him. It used to bother me enough that I would wonder about it but I think we spent too much time together as adversaries and cohorts to see each other as date material.

Once I got back from the Canadian adventure I never really saw him again until our 15th class reunion. We talked some but there were too many people to have a heart to heart so I still don't really know why we didn't date. QT wasn't there, I learned he had moved to TX.

Part of the dating problem was that I really wasn't supposed to date till I was 16. I had very few dates before I left and returned home. After I got back the boys all seemed kind of young to me. No one had done what I did so there was no way I could relate to most of the kids anymore. I grew up too quickly.

The other problem with dating me was that from the time I was 11 until I was almost 15 I had a true, but unrequited, love.

I walked out the door at my Great Grama's house one July morning. The sun was just clearing the trees in the east field. I had a picnic jug of well chrisp water and some plastic cups I was taking out to the men bringing in the hay.

Just as I stepped off the stoop and started for the barn a single, chance ray from the rising sun flung it's golden cloak across the naked shoulders of a tanned, sun blonde, child of the gods as he flung a bale of hay off the trailer and into the loft of the barn.

Every muscle in his chest and back was accented. The sweat on them glistened and glimmered in golden highlights as they flexed and moved with the effort as the bale left his hands and flew the twelve feet or more up and over into the loft.

He took a moment to hitch his tight jeans up with his thumbs, flipped his bangs out of his face then bent to hoist another bale as I stood, awe struck, and watched. It was effortless for him. The golden hair on his arms twinkled in the sunlight. The second bale floated up and into the loft where another, more mortal male, stacked them. The god child stood, hip shot, one hand on his hip, the other wiping the dewed sweat from his brow and brushing back his bangs in one graceful move while he rest for just a minute. The mere mortal moved them out of hs way, clearing the landing area in the loft.

The sun lifted it's ray from him and covered him with the glow of it's normal lighting while he waited. I fell into my first "real" love in that brief, fleeting moment.

I just can't convey how disconnected from the real world this was. It was almost a holy moment. It was like the sun blessed this boy with all of his beauty just for me to treasure. I was alone in the real world and he was from heaven. I should have known the most beautiful things are the most unattainable. I was only 11, though and hadn't learned that yet.

I started and shut my jaw. I realized he was a.) human, and b) hot and sweaty and c) that I had the cold water for him in my hands. My feet started to work again but my brain was still standing there with it's jaw hanging down in wonder. I got all the way to the trailer and couldn't say a word.

He had seen me coming and watched me walking across the yard. I might have been standing there yet if he hadn't strode across the hay bales to the edge of the trailer and crouched down to get the sun out of his eyes and speak to me.

"Hey, sweetheart," were the first words he spoke to me and my heart expanded in my chest with the pleasure of his voice and the kind words. I smiled till I thought my cheeks would shatter. "Is that for us?"

I still couldn't talk but I nodded and reached out to him. It appeared I was handing him the jug and cups. He took them from me and I notice he had strong, square fingers and that even his hands were tanned. My arms dropped to my sides as I got that floaty feeling you get after putting down a heavy load. I knew what it was but still thought it was because of my heart becoming lighter than air.

I just stood there and watched. He stood up, poured a glass of water from the jug and whistled for the other guys to come join him. I watched while he poured for everyone before he drank. I could see the satisfaction and relief they all felt as they drank the cold beverage. There was a round of quiet "aahhh's" as they took the second swallow. I only had eyes for Le Wonder. They gobbled him up. I noticed every little thing.

He was wearing Wrangler straight leg jeans, not too broken in. They gave slightly as he hunkered down so one cheek rested on the heel of his pointy toed boots and his other leg propped up the elbow he held his smoke in. The smoke he pulled out from behind his ear was a "Lucky Strike". He struck a wooden match with his thumbnail to light it. He drew in deeply and blew out smoke rings, flipping his bangs again as they fell over his golden brown eyes.

After a few minutes to finish their drinks the others started back to work. He flipped that butt about 25 feet away, into the gravel of the driveway and well away from the hay wagon. He stood up and stretched, ( oh, be still my beating heart), looked at me standing there and realized I was waiting for the jug and cups. He picked them up, walked back to me at the edge of the wagon, stooped down and passed them to me. I touched his finger when I took the handle of the jug. It jolted me to my toes.

His bangs had fallen across his eyes again. He casually flipped them back again and smiled at me. It smile lifted up one side of his mouth, it was kind of crooked looking in his square jaw. I was transfixed. Snake and bird, hypnotist and victim, raven and shiny foil fascinated by his eyes looking into mine.

"Will you fill that up again for us before we go back to the field, please, " he asked me. I just nodded again. He got up and started tossing bales again. After the second one he noticed me still standing there and gave anod toward the house.

I realized the wagon was almost empty. Then it hit me, I could see him again if I brought the jug again. My feet took off for the house and the rest of me followed. Believe me, I hurried!

I had two days at Great Grams to get to know this Hercules. I made the most of them. No haying crew ever had better service. I hauled water, lemonade, lunches, snacks, and more water. Those lunches had home made cake and cookies, fat sandwiches and chlled fruit in them, lovingly concocted by me with a little help from Grama. The lemonade was sweet with a big chunk of ice in the jug to keep it cold till I got out to the crew.

I always handed everything up to Le Wonder. He always smiled and called me "sweetheart". I finally started talking to him enough to find out I was doomed to failure. He was in high school, almost 17 and had a girlfriend. I was 11, still in 6th grade and didn't have the slightest idea on how to get a guy to pick me to be his girlfriend.

It didn't stop me from loving him, it just meant I had to love from afar. I got pretty good at it.