First Kiss Girl / First Kiss Boy

I woke this morning to the memories of first kiss; a rather pleasant way to greet the day.

My first real kiss arrived unexpectedly in 1971. My family had recently moved to Oklahoma; I was invited to a party with fledging high school friends. When Kristen switched off the living room lights at an opportune moment, the girl next to me — let’s call her Grace — wiggled into my arms and introduced me to the wonder of open lips and wandering tongue. As a newcomer to Native America, I suppressed my inclination to recoil from local customs. I imitated her technique.

I worried that Grace, and others, would intuit my greenhorn status. But Monday gossip whistled along our high school corridors that Shorty Fallon was a good kisser. I breathed relief and thanked god that, as a tuba player born in the bottle-fed 1950’s, I possessed both excellent embouchure and insatiable oral need.

Grace and I proved to be an excellent pair of kissers. After all, she played French horn. But the pressures of dating eclipsed our ecstasy. In Oklahoma circa 1971 high school sweethearts often skipped right on into marriage and parenthood. Everyone seemed to dance to that agenda except me, constitutionally thick to unspoken customs. Grace and I crashed and burned before high school’s end with drama worthy of Dallas. I headed East.

My second first kiss occurred two years later, back in Oklahoma, at a holiday party during my first return from college. The crowd was pretty much the same, though we had graduated from…