The Day My Mom Knew I Wasn't a Kid Anymore

In the summer if 1964 I went home for the summer to visit my parents and my younger brother and sister. You do the math, I was 19 years old. After 18, my father's company policy was to pay transportation "home" for college students twice before the age of 23. I went home twice: 1964 and 1966.

In 1964 they lived in Torremolinos, Spain. Legend had it that Frank Sinatra had once been asked to leave there after some indescretion. It was a Spanish equivalent of Galveston with it's granite sand (black) beaches and tourist trade.

After I had been there a short while, a girl struck up a friendship with me as she had known of me and pined for me since when her family was on assignment to Cartagena, Colombia when mine was in Barrancabermeja, Colombia. We got real chummy, pub crawling, swimming at the beach, riding paddle boats, dancing the night away in general. Focus, I gotta stay focused as this reminded me of another story.

One morning I was at her house visiting (what else was there to do? We had no TV, few friends and no places like YMCA or that.) and we were sitting on the sofa in the living room. Her mother could be seen through a doorway as she bustled about with loads of clothes to be washed.

At one point, for some unexplained reason, as I held her hand in mine I smelled something good, like perfume. I sniffed her hand and was sniffing my way up her arm to her shoulder when her mother walked by. She came back by and asked her daughter to come in the other room. As I innocently waited on the sofa she left and came back a few moments later, only to sit in a parlor chair. Taken aback as there was no room to sit beside her, I asked her why she didn't sit by me on the sofa.

She allowed as how her mother told her she mustn't sit on the sofa with me any more. We passed the time awkwardly until lunchtime when I walked home. When I got there, my mother took me aside to tell me that this girl's mother had called her to complain that I was at her house, in broad daylight, sitting on the sofa with her daughter and like a Lothario, I was kissing up her arm. I laughed my head off, just a-cackling at the mental image she must of had. I explained I was just sniffing up her arm, but the damage was done and it was to no avail. She looked at me differently thereafter. A week or 2 later another girl was visiting me and ma had to go out. She kicked us both out before she left so I wouldn't subject another flower of feminine pulchritude to brazen acts of wild affection. No amount of 'xplaining would suffice to keep us there while she left. It was a rueful laugh I laughed this time.