On First loves

The first time I fell in love I was seven years old. That is not entirely true. Rather, it was the first time that a young lady confessed her love for me. It was done after recess, and I was most likely a sweat mess, not possessed yet of that awful scent that accompanies the onset of puberty and a confusion about when one starts using deodorant. I do not believe that I was still wearing glasses, glasses which had troubled my early years in school with their doltish awkwardness. I think it’s fair to say that my, still persistent refusal to wear glasses is less based in other kids jokes and more firmly grounded in the fact that the first time a girl said she loved me I had just ditched them.

The drawing was done on cheap white paper. I seem to remember a large sun in the right hand corner, with thick bars around its halo in the way of every child’s drawing of the sun. In the foreground was a small grassy patch, colored in quite effectively with green crayon, only a few slivers of white paper showed through. This was the sort of thing that you could tell the young lady had taken time on. There may or may not have been a tree on the left hand side of the paper, right side if you were the canvas. If there was, it was brown, and possessed primarily of limbs that vaguely resembled the rays of the sun. Second graders are not really adept at leaves. The drawing possessed two key features, which I’ve yet to elucidate. One, fore grounded, in what was probably a hand in hand kind of walk were two stick figures.

For years I drew stick figures by using two circles, one larger for the body and then one for the head. Thus, I was not actually drawing stick figures but blob figures. This is the sort of thing that haunts a person like coke bottle glasses. The stick figure on the left had a few strands of hair that sort of also resembled the sun’s rays, and the figure on the right, who I soon presumed was me, possessed not a hair on his head. He may have been wearing a hat. It’s unclear now, twenty four years later. I should point out here that both of the figures had been colored in with a brown crayon, and though the young lady was tan, I was, a bit more Irish than Italian in skin tone. A fact which makes me realize my first brush with love may have been no brush at all, but merely S showing me a picture of some other fine fellow in our class of twenty or so that she’d picked out to walk hand in hand with.


She sat in front of me for those few weeks. We were on a rotational schedule that year whereby the teacher would randomly redistribute us every two months or so. I’m guessing that the teacher’s would claim that it was allowing the children to establish working relationships with a number of different kids, but let’s be honest, was really about separating kids once they got to be friends because they’d no doubt create more problems in the class and laughter and the sort of stuff that you don’t want happening when you’re facing a room full of twenty five seven year olds. Teacher’s aids, mind you, weren’t really in vogue then, so it really was a teacher standing on an island in front of a sea of pale faces.


At that point in time I was sitting in a pod of four desks with her, and a child named T who I remember having an incredibly long tongue that he’d curl and sort of stick out of his mouth while he was attempting to write, and we’d all noted it, and had bits of fun at his expense because kids our cruel. And he was no doubt aware of it and seemed to secretly hate us as we probably hated him in our cruel childish ways. I don’t remember who the fourth child was, nor can I account for having received the note from S with her turning around over her right shoulder, brown hair, shoulder length, respectably cute, though I don’t remember liking a girl until the third grade. I don’t remember what she said to me as she handed me the paper that had, right in the center, where presumably the sun should have been, why do children, myself included, always put the sun in the top left or right of the scene. Is it because it is so rarely directly overhead that we perceive it in this manner? Or is it more direly related to some pre-Copernican idea that we all still secretly cling to, that it is the sun that moves rather than the earth? This should all probably go below. What I do remember her saying, days earlier, was that she did not want to sit next to T. And I must have gestured to her or something because she continued, I say gestured because I don’t remember ever saying more than three words to any girl besides my mother and sister before the age of fourteen, and even then I limited it to fifteen or so, and said, “He picks his nose and eats it.” This is the sort of telling detail that gets remembered long after everything else about a person has faded away, and even now still sort of sends a shiver up my spine. The horror. The horror.


For the record Leopold the 2nd was the king of Belgium who helped to orchestrate the mass murders of thousands of Africans near the turn of the century. Therefore, despite his awesome beard, he was just plain awful.