Innocence

You taught me to play chess.

Each summer, your family would load up in that wonderful VM Microbus with the pop-up sleeping tent, and make the long drive from Minnesota to Texas to spend the summers.

Your younger sister, Laura and I had been good friends for years. A flutter of letters migrated north and south across the country during each school year. I had watched your younger brother learn to walk and talk. Seen your grandmother through a stroke. Seen your dog give birth to a litter of puppies, and seen those puppies grow into dogs.

But it seems that summer, I spent more time with you than your sister. Or at least as much time. You taught me to play chess and to do a back flip of the diving board. We talked, it seems, a lot. But I can’t remember what about. We fished, we swam, we hiked, and rode horses. And we played chess. I think chess became our way of flirting; of shrinking the world to include only the two of us.

And one night at the end of that summer, your mother decided to let all us “kids” sleep in the van. There was certainly plenty of room, and we were all used to camping out. Sleeping in the van was fairly tame. Except it was just the four of us, instead of a whole gang of kids.

And that night, while your younger brother slept, and your sister kindly pretended to, you kissed me.

I remember the whole “where does the nose go?” and “am I doing this right?” dialogue running through my head. A dialogue known to every child embarking upon the adventures of flirting and kissing and learning about love. I was twelve and you were a sophisticated fourteen, how daunting to me that distance of age! How flattering that I had turned your head.

I carried a torch for you at least through November that year. From that single first kiss. A tribute due any first kiss.

By the next summer though, I had transformed. I had discovered drugs, was dating the “cool” boys, older boys on motorcycles with long hair . And my family had quit summering in our quiet little riotous spot in the country, with it’s wild running dogs and wild running kids, with the horses, the swimming pool, the steep cliffs, and the gentle creek.

My childhood left behind me in a sudden single year.

At 38 you died of lung cancer. You! Who had never smoked a cigarette in your life! I heard you died quickly, ran the race from diagnosis to death at breakneck speed. I heard you died an hour or so prior to scheduled surgery. Skipped the anesthesia and slipped instead into death’s cold embrace.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose…

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

- To An Athlete Dying Young
  A.E. Houseman


I still don’t know how to say goodbye to you. I had thought somehow that first kiss made you immortal.

That kiss still lives in my heart.  

Immortal after all, I suppose.