Kiss The Girl

There were around sixty students in my graduating class. I’m guessing there were less than two hundred and forty students in our high school, the majority of which grew up on farms. Our school, Lewisburg High, was in rural area, located in a town of five hundred people and surrounded by farms and tiny communities in every direction for miles and miles. The largest town in our county, Russellville, Kentucky, which had a population of only six thousand, was eleven or twelve miles south, and Nashville, Tennessee was about sixty miles south of Russellville.

Young men and young ladies in the 1950’s and 1960’s, living in the middle of nowhere, sometimes had a hard time getting together, especially if the young man didn’t have a car, or even more so if that young man wasn’t old enough to get a drivers license. And I include the fourteen and fifteen aged boys because they wanted what every teenage boy wanted. They wanted to “kiss the girl”. I can’t speak for teenage girls, but I’m pretty sure many of them wanted to kiss the boy. Those of us who grew up in that time period probably remember how we were able to managed to get together with the boy or girl we wanted to kiss, or even perhaps a girl who was yet to be determined.

We had a lot of parties; there were parties at a friends house, in the summer parties at someone’s cabin on Lake Malone, church parties which sometimes were occasions like hayrides, wiener roasts, Christmas caroling, or what back then we called socials On those church sponsored events the boy might not get a chance to kiss the girl, but he could usually hold her hand. We went on double dates, usually to a movie in Russellville or to the drive-in. Basketball and baseball games and other school activities sometimes gave us opportunities to kiss the girl. Usually going on a date was the only sure fire way that the boy got to kiss the girl.

I didn’t date a lot in high school. I was pretty shy and I got very nervous when it came to asking a girl to go with me on a date. However, I did get a chance to kiss a few girls. My first opportunity was at age fifteen when I was a sophomore. I really liked some of the girls in the senior class. On two occasions that year I kissed two of those girls, one at a party, and the other one at a baseball game. A better way of explaining this is that they kissed me. During my high school days there was really only one girl that I dated for any length of time and that was only for maybe three months. A night or so after that ended, in the summer after I had graduated,  I met the most beautiful girl at a party and began a courtship that lasted for almost six years. Actually it has lasted for a little over fifty four years, the better part of six years dating and 48 years married. In all that time this boy has kissed the girl, my wife Sherri, more times than I can count. And I still enjoy kissing that girl!