I KNEW NOTHING ABOUT GIRLS, BUT I LEARNED

Having no sisters, I knew absolutely nothing about girls. By the time I was 13, I began to notice them in a different way than before.

I developed a crush on a girl named Carolyn Pearl McDaniel. She knew I had a crush on her, but she pretended she could care less about me, turning up her nose when I approached with the hang-dog look of obvious liking for her. For a time, I suffered terribly, being in hopeless love with her, but I never said anything to her; it was an arms-length unrequited romance. She was my age and went to the same church, and my advances to her were strictly with my eyes; I stared at her every chance I had. She had beautiful long wavy brown hair, brown eyes, dimples and a nice smile-for everybody but me.

My chances multiplied during Vacation Bible School. She and I were in the same class. When I sat down beside her, she would pretend being called across the room by a girlfriend, which left me staring across the room at her instead of watching the teacher. The whole class could not help but know my pitiful obsession. When we lined up for Kool-Aid, I stood behind her, hoping to be jostled enough to touch her or feel her hair, but she would step back in line a couple of places and I was too proud to follow her.

Suddenly everything changed. When I was my deepest in despair, she came up to me, to my astonishment, without saying a word, and got in line in front of me! I was dumbfounded. We didn't talk. I couldn't have told her my name. After recess, when we went back to class, she stood waiting until I picked a chair, and, wonder of all wonders, she promptly sat down beside me. I looked sideways toward her, without turning my head, to see if it was really HER, and it was. From then on we were together all the time, and after the first day, I was able to manage a few stupid words. Of course, she started talking to me like we had been sweethearts for years, and everything she said was brilliant and wonderful!



We had a game at parties called, "Spin the Bottle." Boys sat on one side of the room and girls on the other. The boy or girl who was "it" would stand in the middle and spin a Coke bottle on the floor. If a boy spun, he tried to make it stop pointing at the girl he was sweet on. If it did, she jumped up, and they got to go out of the house into the darkness and walk to the corner and back together. If they tarried more than a minute an adult would saunter down the street and casually walk them back. On the other hand, if the bottle pointed at a wallflower, they would RUSH OUT and BACK before the next spin.

A particularly painful way for a boy to show his love for a girl was to carve her initials into his wrist with a kitchen match. It became a fad, and it meant the boy was serious. An unlit kitchen match's white head was rubbed back and forth on the arm until an ugly whelp was raised. By the time that I raised the initials CPM on my outside left arm just above my wrist, my love for a girl with that many names had been severely tested. I enjoyed showing it off at church, while Carolyn Pearl pretended to be proud of it. After a few days the whelps turned into ugly scabs, and their namesake was turning her nose up at them. After the scabs came, the white scars lasted for months, long after we had broken up.