I first spotted her while splashing around with friends in the large Elks Club swimming pool.  I still see her strikingly pretty face and that bright pink one-piece bathing suit with the skirt.  She is chatting with friends, waist-deep in the water.  A good swimmer, already with a clutch of ribbons in my drawer from swim races against other area teams, I dive into the water and swim under it, scraping the bottom of the pool.  I take a snaking route and soon go right past her legs, perhaps barely brushing them with my own.   I don’t dare surface.  Holding that long breath, I swim on, still snaking around the expanse of the pool bottom, until I’ve passed many other pairs of legs.  I come up for air only after I am safely shrouded by the other kids’ torsos between me and her.

I am 13 years old, and I am terribly girl-shy.  It is the summer before I begin high school, and God Forbid that I should speak with her.

******

Some of my friends at the pool recognize her, and they tell me she will also be a first-year student in high school, one different from my own new school.  As it happens, her public high school is right across the highway from my neighborhood.  It even shares some design features with my more distant, Catholic high school.  Which isn’t odd, as my father–an architect–had designed both schools only a few years apart.

I see her periodically at the pool over that summer, but I do not speak with her.  I had never had a girlfriend, nor any advice for my great shyness about such things.  All I could do was think about her.

Fall came, and I start high school.  I find that experience immediately exciting and stressful, what with all of the new faces, larger classes, moving from classroom to classroom during the day, taking Latin!  And pretty classmates who also rendered me mute.  All of that “chaos” should have distracted me from her, but it didn’t.

In September my neighborhood buddies–also first-years at the nearby public high school–tell me that the school was hosting its first sock hop of the year.  (High school dances were literally sock hops when they were held in school gymnasiums.  School authorities did not want the kids’ shoes to damage the polished basketball floor.   Hence, only socks were allowed on the floor.)  They suggest I come with them.  They say she may be there.

I go, but with no plan or remedies for my deep well of reticence.  The gym is overflowing with kids–some hundreds–most listening to the rock band on the stage, a few dancing.  From near the stage, as subtly as I can, I scan the crowd.  And there she is, standing at the other end of the gym, 50 or more feet away.  Our eyes do not meet.  But about seven minutes later I hear someone over the music say “Hi”,  just behind my right shoulder.  She has found me.

******

In addition to her beauty, she radiates a warm charm that disarms my shyness.  Soon, we plan our first date–which is not easy to do, since we do not live near each other and of course neither of us can drive.  So we triple date to the movie downtown with two of my neighborhood friends from her school, brothers, one of whom has just gotten his driver’s license.  It is my first ever date, and I look to my friends for cues about how to manage myself.  The car ride is full of adolescent chatter, and I do not have to say much.  It is quite enough to be sitting so tightly squeezed against her in the crowded back seat.  The movie is a long period of silence and shared popcorn, and the plot of the film eludes me.  Then the return ride home.  We stop by her family’s house and I walk her to the door–and, scarily unsure about how to behave, I simply say how much fun I had–and, goodnight.

This is the basic dating model that carries us through our several freshman year dates, with some post-movie ice cream stops and leisurely walks under the street lamps on the empty city streets added to the itinerary.  But the dates are never routine because the pressure is always there.  What next move to make and when to make it?  When to put an arm around her shoulders at the movie?  When to hold hands on the street?  And, most harrowing of all, when to have our–my–first kiss?

My friends are little help.  Just go for it, they say.  After much delay, by late fall I finally resolve to “go for it,” to try for our first goodnight kiss on her doorstep.  Our triple-dating ride stops to let her off at her home, and as usual I walk her to the front door.  And we chat.  And we chat some more, and still we chat.  My mind is spinning, and I scarcely hear our conversation.   My two friends and their dates wait in the driveway, the car within view of the front door, and I am acutely aware of my audience.  Thirty minutes of chat at the door has now passed–and nothing.  At about that point, her mother comes to the door and politely suggests that it is time for her to come in.  I am both relieved and humiliated.

Later, I take some ribbing from my two friends.  The situation is hardly funny to me, but they are not cruel.  And we plan another triple date.

The action unfolds just as it had on our previous date.  The waiting car in the driveway, the incessant going-nowhere chatting at the doorway, the nerves of jello.  But her mother doesn’t show up, and we “visit” at the front door for 45 minutes.  At which point my roiling humiliation unexpectedly overwhelms my insufferable anxiety, and I lean forward and kiss her on the lips.

******

My 13-year-old self would not have been able to put words to the experience.  But it was transformative.  I was only vaguely aware that I had passed into a new phase of my life, one from which I would never retreat.  That innocent kiss–two or three seconds of our lives, soft lips only, hands on her waist–would linger.  It would linger, in fact, forever.  To this day, I cannot imagine anything sweeter.

Two days ago, in the on-line version of my hometown newspaper, I read her death notice.  No obituary, no description of her life or her family, only the scant notice that she had died, and that there would be a celebration of her life at a later, unspecified date.

******

Over the nearly 60 years since that November kiss, I spoke with her only once, on the phone during a visit I made to my hometown in the late 1980s.  By then we were both married and had a child each.  Much water had gone under our respective bridges.  But I wanted to connect, to find out who she had become, because she remained such a shining figure in my life experience.  Our conversation was warm but brief.  The most memorable moment occurred when a point of politics entered our discussion.   I do not recall how it came up, but I commented critically about Lt. Col. Oliver North and his involvement in the then-ongoing Iran-Contra scandal at the top of the Reagan Administration.  Her response was as moving to me as it was informative.  She all but pleaded, “Oh, Pete.  Please don’t say that about him.”

I flinched.  For a moment, I was 13 again, and I had accidently hurt her.  It truly pained me.  At the same time, I was in my latter 30s and I realized something of the distance that had grown between us.

******

At the end of our first year in high school, I asked her to sign my school yearbook.  In her lovely handwriting, she began with this:  “Pete, You are the most wonderful guy I’ve ever known.”  I was thrilled.  But first loves are nothing if not evanescent.  Two months later I ran into her at the County Fair, and she was arm-in-arm with another, older guy.   And that was that.

She has come to mind from time to time in the years since we last spoke, but I still know very little about her life.  At some point she divorced.  In her later years she was apparently afflicted by some ailment, as a recent photo in the local paper showed her looking vulnerable, with a walker.  But the photo also showed the sweetness that is all I think of when I think of her.  She was laying a wreath of flowers on the hood of the squad car of a local policeman who had just been killed in the line of duty.

Adieu, sweet friend.  Like that first summer at the pool, again I can only think of you.  I am deeply saddened by your passing, but I will carry our memories as long as I can.   Requiescat in pace.